[Qgis-developer] GRASS support in MSVC build

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Benjamin

Just to re-affirm, we have no plans to drop maintainance of MINGW
build. CMake is an incredible build system letting us target so many
platforms, and we are just trying to make best use of it.

QGIS has been from the outset a project embracing the philosophy of
open source and openness, and that will only continue. Also, if your
platform is Microsoft Windows, you are already on an encumbered
proprietary operating system, for me it does not take a giant leap
into the moral abyss to add using the free Microsoft Visual Studio
Express on that platform - especially if in doing so we can expose a
lot more people used to working in a closed environment to some great
open source software.

Best Regards

Tim

2007/11/10, Benjamin Ducke <benjamin.ducke at ufg.uni-kiel.de>:
> Thanks for the explanations.
> I'll look into that Express Edition.
> One last thing I'd like to know:
>
> Will it be possible to mix GRASS binaries and libs produced with MinGW
> with QGIS MSVC bins?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Benjamin
>
> Jürgen E. Fischer wrote:
> > Hi Benjamin,
> >
> > On Sat, 10. Nov 2007 at 11:34:05 +0100, Benjamin Ducke wrote:
> >> Apologies for my ignorance, but what is the idea about having
> >> an MSVC build of QGIS alongside the MinGW build? Does it not
> >> cost a lot of additional effort to maintain two compiler bases?
> >
> >> Does the MSVC build have any particular advantages over the
> >> MinGW build, so that we can expect the MinGW path to be
> >> abandoned in the future?
> >
> > As Tim pointed out yesterday IRC on, why there is MSVC build:
> > (quoted from http://logs.qgis.org/slogs/%23qgis.2007-11-09.log)
> > 1) to attract the win crowd you got to give them their preferred brand of heroin
> >    ie a development environment based on msvc
> > 2) so far the msvc packages I made are a *lot* more compact (18mb vs 30mb for
> >    openModeller)
> > 3) because we can
> > 4) if you are building some ms native app and want a mapping control you cant
> >    easily just use the mingw libs if everything else you do is built using msvc
> > 5) building with msvc has some advantages for debugging etc if you are a gui
> >    addict
> > 6) to attract venture capital from microsoft
> >
> > Personally apart from 6, which I'd replace with masochims, I'd second that.
> >
> > And I've to use MSVC for other windows projects anyway and find it's debugging
> > and code browsing capabilities very useful.
> >
> > Additionally using different compilers can improve code quality a bit as one
> > compiler might issue warnings on things the others don't catch.
> >
> >> If so, I for one will not be able to participate in the
> >> development of the Win32 version of QGIS.
> >
> > Why not?  You can use the Express Edition of MSVC, which is free (as in free
> > beer).
> >
> > Beeing at it, I don't know if Microsoft will continue to have free (as in free
> > beer) Express Editions and alone for that reason the MinGW build shouldn't die.
> > But I don't expect it too, anyway.
> >
> >
> > Jürgen
> >
>
> --
> Benjamin Ducke, M.A.
> Archäoinformatik
> (Archaeoinformation Science)
> Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte
> (Inst. of Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology)
> Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
> Johanna-Mestorf-Straße 2-6
> D 24098 Kiel
> Germany
>
> Tel.: ++49 (0)431 880-3378 / -3379
> Fax : ++49 (0)431 880-7300
> www.uni-kiel.de/ufg
>
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-- 
Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee Member - Release  Manager
Visit http://qgis.org for a great open source GIS
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