[p4] Build tool for Perforce builds & Dev Studio......

[Stephen Vance]

At 10:44 PM 6/14/2001 -0700, Jeff A. Bowles wrote:
>I wrote:
>>  many, many companies use MS Dev Studio
>>         project files and build using "msdev /make filename.prj"
>>         to build the projects (which is a mechanism I don't like)
>
>At 12:23 AM 6/15/2001 -0400, Paul C. Pharr wrote:
>>I'm interested in this statement & I'm wondering if you could expand on 
>>it a little. We are now deploying an auto-build system which test builds 
>>all submissions to our depot on both Mac and Windows. Since we use MSVC's 
>>project files for our main project on Windows, the auto-build system must 
>>reliably kick off DevStudio builds, and we were intending to use the 
>>msdev /make mechanism but after fighting with it, we were foiled at every 
>>turn. It seems wholly unreliable when called from popen in a python 
>>script - apparently related to the fact that msdev is not really a 
>>console application but behaves something like one when called with 
>>/make. . . .
>

[ ... ]

Jeff, I agree with most of your points, but ...

>         I don't like "msdev /make" for the simple reason that it's using
>         a binary file that cannot easily be recreated or tracked, to 
> determine
>         every last thing about the build, compile flags, source files to 
> include,
>         and so on. Although you can tweak things to make it less unpleasant,
>         it's just nearly impossible to know that the REAL difference between
>         build A and build B is that the second was compiled with debugging
>         on and with this library substituted for that one.

Actually, .dsw and .dsp files are shockingly well-behaved text files. once 
you get to know them.  They version pretty well, except for the occasional 
ordering switcheroo.

[ ... ]

>         I would use it as a stopgap measure while I figured out
>         how to either generate a MS Dev Studio project file from
>         a text-file template (with some sort of automation to build
>         to project file) or while I researched another build tool.

Very practical with dsp and dsw files, at least until they change the 
format on you next version. ;-)


Stephen Vance
mailto:steve at vance.com
http://www.vance.com/