kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>]

On 06/03/2019 18:39, Mark Roszko wrote:
> Tom,
> 
> Have you looked at vcpkg?
> https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg
> 
> It's basically Microsoft's C++ library manager that integrates with
> CMake standalone and VS2017/VSCode/VS2019.
> The downside is the libraries get built on each user's machine for a
> given arch you specify but not that bad.

I don't understand the need for building the dependencies through a
package manager. This is a must under Linux which is a moving target -
different distributions use different versions, build options, etc.

In the case of Windows builds, I would just release a binary archive of
all dependencies (with instructions how to rebuild it from scratch for
the brave/curious). It's a tedious process, especially if Python comes
into play, so I'd rather spare this to "ordinary" programmers.

Tom

> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 12:17 PM Tomasz Wlostowski
> <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx <mailto:tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     This patchset enables building KiCad in MS Visual Studio (version 2017,
>     not tested on earlier versions). It is largely based on patches &
>     library builds by Simon Richter (thanks a lot!), with some improvements:
>     - no MSVC-specific patches other than setting the compiler parameters.
>     - no need for require boost::context workarounds as libcontext now
>     supports MSVC through native Windows Fiber API.
>     - prebuilt environment [1], containing the right versions of libraries
>     and tools (CMake & CMake modules). The supplied libraries currently
>     support only debug x86_64 targets.
> 
>     Some of you might ask why bother with MSVC support? Here's a bunch of
>     reasons:
>     - A debugger that really works. GDB under Windows offers,
>     euphemistically speaking, sub-optimal user experience (very slow, Ctrl-C
>     kills the debugger instead of stopping the application being debugged,
>     enormous size of debug symbols).
>     - Much faster builds. GCC is very fast under Unix systems, but under
>     Unix emulation (MINGW) all the speed disappears.
>     - MSVC runtime libraries are quite different from the GNU/OSX ones. This
>     has already led to discovery of some critical bugs (StrNumCmp()). In
>     general. Building and testing KiCad with a non-GCC/Clang compiler can
>     only improve the quality of our code.
>     - I'm hoping new developers will join us. After all, 90% of desktop
>     software is made for Windows, most of it is written in VS and proficient
>     developers don't like switching their IDEs too often.
> 
>     Happy testing,
>     Tom
> 
>     PS. Could someone of our website maintainers give some space to host the
>     archive [1] on kicad-pcb.org <http://kicad-pcb.org>?
> 
>     [1] https://cernbox.cern.ch/index.php/s/UaFwaznK4258kZC
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Mark