Re: Producing MS Developer Studio Project files

[Benoit SIGOURE]

On Sep 1, 2007, at 2:58 PM, Bob Rossi wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 09:49:47AM -0500, Gurpreet Sachdeva wrote:
> > Hi Paul,
> >
> > I read your post (very old) about producing MSVC project files from
> > makefile.am files
> >
> > http://www.cygwin.com/ml/automake/2000-02/msg00019.html
> >
> > Were you able to find/create a tool which does that? I am  
> > interested in this
> > and was planning to write a one if required. If there is a  
> > existing tool
> > (stable/unstable). I can take that forward for maintaining.
> >
> > Please let me know if you have any inputs on this.
>
> Is there any beta support for this? I can test it out. I'm  
> assumming you
> would need to run this from a mingw or cygwin shell, is that true?
>
> I think this would be an extremely nice improvement to the automake
> system. As it stands, I'm currently going to have to support 2 build
> systems, one for POSIX world, and one for msft.
>
> Thanks,
> Bob Rossi

FYI, I also had to deal with this issue (that is, how to build UNIXy  
projects with the Microsoft toolchain) and the solution I came up  
with after a month of hacking and trial-and-error process is that I  
wrap the entire MS Visual C++ toolchain with shell scripts that set  
proper environment variables suitable to run cl.exe and the like from  
Cygwin, I use a modified version of cccl (which I sent upstream but  
the project doesn't seem to be maintained anymore, you can find it at  
[1]) with a patched version of GNU Make 3.81 (until 3.82 is released  
at least) see [2].

With all these hooks and stuff I can build almost any standard UNIX  
package with MS VC++ provided that the code itself compiles on VC++  
(that is, the packaging system will not get in the way).  This comes  
very handy when you want to use all the standard features of the  
autotools (such as distcheck) against a MS VC++ build.

Somewhere in my TODO list (very deep inside it) I have a plan to make  
a public release of all this (including installer script and stuff)  
but in the mean time you can try the patches/tools I mentioned and I  
can help you off-list if needed.

[1] http://www.tsunanet.net/~tsuna/cccl
[2] http://www.tsunanet.net/~tsuna/make-3.81-cygwin.patch
    http://www.tsunanet.net/~tsuna/make-3.81- 
cygwin_MAKE_expansion.patch
    Can't be bothered to find the related posts on GNU Make W32 ML  
archive, sorry.

--
Benoit Sigoure aka Tsuna
EPITA Research and Development Laboratory

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