Re: [Flightgear-devel] Flight Gear on Windows

[Geoff M. <ub...@ge...>]

On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 13:42 +0100, Erik Hofman wrote:
> Geoff McLane wrote:
> > About 5 weeks ago you removed the FlightGear.dsp and FlightGear.dsw
> Hmm, I get mixed request from different Windows developers. I was asked 
> to remove them!
> 
> Honestly I thought the project files are stored in their own directory 
> (e.g. projetcs/MSVC9.0) these days.

Hi Eric,

>> I was asked to remove them!
Who asked, and why? I did not read this on the list,
or maybe missed it, otherwise I would have offered 
an 'opinion' then ;=))

>> the project files are stored in their own directory
Yes, we do have projects/VC90 and VC7.1, and we did have
VC80 as well, for both SG and FG! But these are only as
up-to-date as the developer who put them there, and 
maintains them. 

Thus they are ONLY maintained if and when that developer
does it, Fred. But his last update was now some time
ago, although I note Tim has recently added some patches
from Vivian...

docs-mini/README.MSVC - last update by you 2005
This only really points to Fred's ftp directory at -
 ftp://ftp.ihg.uni-duisburg.de/FlightGear/Win32/MSVC/
where the last build file zip is dated June 2005!

docs-mini/README.MSVC8 - last update 2006
This refers to MSVC8, which has been removed! and
points to a wiki -

http://wiki.flightgear.org/flightgear_wiki/index.php?title=Building_Flightgear
which, under the 'Building FlightGear - Windows', does provide
quite a detailed build description, and as an external link
at the bottom, points to my 'build' center!

I assume this dependence on 'other' developers is why Curt?
or who ever, wrote the am2dsp.pl script. Fred even made a 
small update to it a few years back to change to /MD...

Now am2dsp.pl could be modified to write build files into
say 'projects/MSVC' if desired, to get these files out of 
the root area...

And am2dsp.pl provides a way you, and/or other cvs
maintainers can ensure there are _ALWAYS_ up-do-date
MSVC build files, regardless of the disposition of other
developers. And I see NO REASON to provide multiple
build version files. One MSVC6 set would be enough,
since they can be used by ALL later versions.

As stated, it is hard to have a really 'generic'
way in MSVC, thus each native WIN developer has his/her
own way of doing things. Very few of the 3rd party
dependent libraries are available for something like
the simple 'apt-get', so they have to get into
building all of these themselves. Hence my detailed
build center, that always gets into _ALL_ the other
dependent sources, and how to build them...

I would do the mods to am2dsp.pl to move the files
to say :-
 projects/MSVC
if that is desired/required, and could add some lines
to README.MSVC and MSVC8 to talk about these 'generic',
'simple' am2dsp.pl generated build files if they are
put back in either place...

And, yes, let us hear from other native windows
developers... What are other suggestions here?

Regards,

Geoff.