Note from a donor

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, October 28, 2017 03:45:02 evilrat via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 October 2017 at 03:00:16 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > ... I rewrote our build stuff so that it was all generated with
> > cmake. Then editing the build was the same on both platforms,
> > and building was _almost_ the same. I didn't even need to open
> > up VS anymore - for configuration or for building. It was
> > glorious.
> >
> > I expect that it's the sort of thing that would annoy many
> > Windows devs though, because the fact that the VS files were
> > generated meant that you couldn't make changes in VS and have
> > it stick (which from my perspective was great, but for a
> > hardcore Windows person, probably not so much).
>
> Never heard of anyone who is annoyed by cmake/vs combo. Quite the
> opposite, there is an issue with "true" hardcore Linux devs who
> cannot into cmake. They stuck with autotools, which is not an
> option on Windows. This especially true for any C projects, and
> also the fact that we stuck with C89 on Windows. And another side
> of the problem is commercial middleware carp which distributed as
> VS projects only and only supports some "ancient" VS version,
> though I can't remember such examples.

The problem would be Windows devs who wanted to change any settings inside
of VS. I don't think that it would have even worked to retain the file
that's specific to the user, since it sits next to the normal VS project
files, which were in a directory that would be deleted whenever a full
rebuild was done. So, as long as you didn't need to configure any aspect of
VS where the settings were saved in a file in that directory, you'd be fine,
but something like your local debug settings for the project would probably
be lost on a regular basis.

So, while someone who's more of a Linux dev is likely to be very much in
favor of using cmake to control everything, a hardcore Windows dev who uses
VS on a regular basis might not view it the same way. Personally, I think
that most anyone dealing with VS would be better off using cmake to generate
its project files than using VS to control that stuff (it is _so_ easy to do
stuff like make it so that the debug and release builds are not in sync if
you're configuring VS directly), but I wouldn't have dared to suggest it at
my last job, which was a Windows-only shop. The folks there were too
Windows-centric and too set in their ways for that to have gone over well at
all, even though it likely would have fixed a number of our build-related
problems.

- Jonathan M Davis