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

[Timo Kreuzer]

Am 12.01.2013 09:11, schrieb J. C. Jones:
> The fact that it is not possible to build, say, just *applications*, 
> or just *drivers*, without hunting-and-pecking projects in the 
> *Solution Workspace*, is related to problem
No, it's just a missing cmake command to generate a solution file for 
applications.
Of course you cannot build applications without building it's 
dependencies. And since we build all our dependencies (CRT, importlibs, 
certain headers) ourselves, all of these will be put into a solution for 
applications.

Having different architectures in the build will most likely never work, 
since it requires completely different cmake passes. Especially for ARM 
you need to do a cross build, where you first need to compile the host 
tools for x86 and then the rest for ARM (I think I made a configure 
script for that). I also don't see any merit in it. Noone usually 
switches between architectures on the fly. It's only there, because it's 
the best way to maintain it in VS project files, if that is how you 
organize your build. But we don't do that, we use cmake files.

/"Wow...*800-project* solution. Let's see, *x86_32*, *x86_64, ARM* 
support..nice...both *Debug* and *Release* present...good good...looks 
like *Solution Workspace* mirrors what is on disk..cool*...#include* 
paths in IDE project settings are relative to root of solution so I can 
move solution to another disk if I like...appreciate 
that...*IntelliSense* seems to be working correctly...and this *livecd* 
thing...I guess right-clicking on that and doing *Build* does minimum 
operations necessary to generate a live CD. I wonder what happens when I 
try to execute the *livecd* project after built. Wow...that is too 
awesome!!! Ok. Everything makes sense.  I can handle myself from here. 
Thanks."/

No offence, but a developer that judges a project solely on the fact 
that it managed to slap 800 modules into a single VS solution, rather 
than by the code or dozens of other factors, should probably rethink his 
profession ;-)
I have been workig on a number of different projects, all with different 
build systems. Some sucked bad (autoconf shit) other were ok. ReactOS 
has the best build system of all of these. And the key here is 
simplicity and performance. No manual defining of 100 configuration 
commands plus 20 minutes over and over repeating test and configuration 
steps. It's simple. It builds fast. And it supports MSVC (WDK and VS 
from 2010 to 2012) and GCC and works on Windows/Linux/Mac. VS solution 
support is just sugar on top of that.
And this is a complete f*cking Operating System and not a shitty browser.

IMO, we should give Amine time to get the ReactOS repository into this 
state..

Amine already did an awesome job. And delivered. If you need anything 
more: "We accept patches!"(tm)
Or ... you could get a bunch of skilled devs that all strongly want 
these features and that might motivate someone to work on this.
There's a lot of things that might be interesting for someone. An ARM 
port might be interesting, an x64 port might be interesting, a native 
DirectX might be interesting, support for WDDM drivers might be 
interesting, .... a working Memory Manager that doesn't crash all the 
time might be interesting.
And now guess which of these would be considered a priority, and which 
of these not.
I guess you'd need to convince someone of the demand / importance or 
take things in your own hands.

WBR,
Timo

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