On 23/07/13 15:10, luca barbato wrote:
The problem is that Win devs work with MSVC. Asking them to use MinGW is not realistic.There are 2 problems, one is if you have contributor using only msvc and wanting to touch only system native tools, that is a near impossible solution. Relaxing it so they can have a generator for a msvc project is simple, cmake can do that out of box, but then they must learn cmake and update it from their msvc changes. The other is _usage_ on windows. In that case as long there is a windows build with debug symbols and headers they are happy. The second is easy to achieve with both build systems and actually easier with autotools.
True.So the alternative is to ditch MSVC support entirely and depend only on MinGW on Windows platform. The solution is appealing as it would allow us to remove the cmake support and end up with a single build system.
The downside is, obviously, making it hard for windows-native-only developers to participate in the development. However, the restriction is acceptable. With the current market situation I would guess that Windows devs would treat using minGW as a possibility to learn something from the mainstream programming, rather than as using an obscure build tool.
That being said, what are the other downsides on MinGW. Does it introduce additional run-time dependencies? Does it make hard to debug? Etc.
Martin
