[fdo-internals] FDO RFC 18 - Migrate to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008

[Frank Warmerdam]

Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> Greg Boone wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> There has been no feedback on this issue so far. I would like to give
>> everyone another chance to comment before calling for a vote.
> 
> Honestly, I'm not happy with the idea to drop support of Visual Studio 
> 2005. In fact, it won't mean FDO stops compiling with Visual C++ 8.0
> but it only means upgrade to new version of solutions and projects.
> I don't think the availability of free VS2008 solves the problem, 
> because I think VS2005 is still widely used and some people may not be 
> happy with messing their environments with such a huge beast
> as another VS instance.
> 
> This is situation tells me that it would be a very good idea to migrate 
> to a builder that does not depend on Visual Studio solution/project and 
> that won't force us and users to stick to very specific compiler
> version. cmake is one of the builder I have in mind.
> 
> FDO is buildable with Visual C++ 7.1 and 8.0, so why we would want to
> forget about this not-so-old and still very good C++ compilers (?).

Greg,

I feel a bit like Mateusz, though perhaps less strongly.  In the long term
I think a more compiler agnostic build environment would be desirable.

However, if we are going to migrate to VS2008 project files, then I do
think we at least need to ensure that FDO is easily built with VS2008
Express.  I'll take an action item (though I may need reminding) to
confirm and try to help with any VS2008 Express issues once the project
file migration is complete.

I will say that the RFC does not seem to provide a strong motivation for
the migration.  VS2008 can load VS2005 project files, right?  I'm assuming
the issue is that if virtually everyone is using VS2008 then it is hard
to update the project files because VS2008 doesn't write VS2005 project
files.  Is that the situation?

PS. I'm thinking of publishing marketing notice from the GDAL team that
GDAL 1.5.1 is "the highest quality release even, and ensures that you are
more productive during geospatial data management" on my web site -
apparently that will make it a fact!

OK, Orest, perhaps that harsh, but I'm hardly willing to upgrade just
because Microsoft says "it's newer, it's better!"

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org