minutes of ESC call ...

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 04:56:07PM +0000, Michael Meeks wrote:
>                   + someone creating e.g. a Visual Studio extension that does all the cygwin/git clone/gerrit bootstrapping would be much appreciated though (Bjoern)
> [...]
>             + eg. a pre-canned bundle with pre-built 'externals' and pre-canned VS file made from make (Michael)

... and the core issue with that is the number of different configs we support
even on Windows. While that makes some sense on Linux, where each distro is a
unique snowflake in some way, it makes very little sense on Windows, where most
things should be the same on all systems. Or at least _could_ be the same on
all systems.

I mean, we could have a tinderbox run "./autogen.sh && make
vs2013-ide-integration" once a week and make it commit the result Visual Studio
solutions to the core repo. Note this does _not_ need a full build anymore, so
should be a matter of minutes. But for those to work universally, it requires
tooling that reproduces pretty much exactly as on the canonical tinderbox that
created the solutions, including:

- SRCDIR
- BUILDDIR
- cygwin install

LODE did some great steps in that direction, but I fear is not quite there yet.
If you get Windows builds to kill all those degrees of freedom, then this
should work just fine (including pre-build 'external').

So again: This is less of an build issue, than one of configuration management.

Best,

Bjoern