[ros-dev] Notice Of Intent - Visual Studio Build of ReactOS

[Aleksey Bragin]

Hi JC,
I highly appreciate your non-biased view on the matter. However, I'm 
afraid I'll have to justify why this is being done this way.

In theory and in practice, it's doable. An effort may be done to create 
a full set of build steps so that ReactOS builds by pressing Ctrl+Shift+B.
But think of it: it's going to be another build system, parallel to the 
existing one, and it will live as long as maintainers want to support 
it. Every change to the build process (e.g. adding a new source code 
file) would need to be duplicated in the vs projects file tree.

It may be possible to automate creation of these project files and the 
solution, but still it would involve a serious effort to make these 
generated projects actually buildable. I'm not aware about current 
status of that builder.

What I suggest you to do in any case is to try building ReactOS with 
RosBE now. You need to feel [simplicity of] the current build system 
before trying to improve it - that'd be a logical step in any 
improvement process.

Best regards,
Alex Bragin

On 02.01.2013 0:46, J. C. Jones wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Some of you might have seen my recent on the post regarding the build
> process:
> http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=12240&start=15
>
> As I mentioned, it would help greatly to lower the barrier-to-entry to
> less-experienced developers, as well as more experienced developers who
> might have limited time budgets [Who among us does not have a limited time
> budget?].
>
> I wanted to send out this message to let everyone know that I intend to use
> what bit of time that I available right now, at the beginning of January, to
> tackle this issue head-on. Again, my purpose here is not to step on anyone's
> toes, but make certain that we never turn away a potentially-valuable
> contributor simply because they are unnecessarily removed from their
> development comfort zone. I do realize that there is already on-going work
> on the build process, and I have no intention of interfering with that.
>
> I will wait 24-hours for any objections/reservations from now before making
> a hard commitment, but frankly, we really to get this done, like right now.
>
> Happy New Year. :)
>
> -JC
>