minutes of ESC call ...

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 05:59:53PM +0000, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 	Sure - although my ideal flow for a (Windows) newbie here would be:
> 
> 	* download 'something'
    (actually, Visual Studio can directly clone git repos, so manual downloads shouldnt be needed)

> 	* load file in Visual Studio
> 	* ctrl-shift-b to build ... <wait>

    E.g. in Kdevelop and QtCreator have global build targets. It should be
    trivial to add to MSVS if someone wants to take ownership of that.

> 	* click the green triangle to debug ;-)

    Certainly works for kdevelop and used to work for MSVS.

So for C++ targets this already works with essentially just (native) GNU make.
Its all the other plumbing that is causing the pain.

> 	Where of course that 'something' would need to be constructed by some
> tinderbox / slave, and (ideally) contain everything not easily buildable
> with the IDE already pre-built =)

Ok, who is going to finally kill scp2, the horribly icon-theme scriping, UNO
registry generation plumbing etc. for good? (With kill=port to plain C++ tooling).

 
> 	Personally I'd see this as an entry mode: once people have the
> satisfaction of seeing their work 'working' they can graduate to
> installing cygwin, and <insert other pain points>. Clearly there would
> be nothing authoritative about it etc.

That would assume to use a pregenerated autoconf output then (as autoconf need
essentially all of POSIX and then some). Possibly -- but not without its own
pain points (ask any Sun engineer, this is was how StarOffice builds were like).

> 	AFAICS - there -should- also be no need for cygwin, LODE, or anything
> else in this world ;-) just a single download.

Well, we sneakily use various bits of sed/gawk/gperf/perl/python/zip/tar/... in
various corners of the build. Killing those and replacing them with GNU make
and plain C++ would be good, but is quite a thankless effort. I agree though it
would be appreciated to make the build easier to bootstrap. 

tl;dr: First kill the POSIX deps sprinkled all over the repo[1], building a bit of
C++ libs isnt the issue.  All the plumbing around it is.

Best,

Bjoern

[1] FWIW, this is why I used a C++ executable for "make gbuildtojson" stuff
    instead of some Python foo.