Re: Fwd: Re: What does the file extension ".hg" mean?

[John Emmas <johne53 tiscali co uk>]

On 01/07/2013 12:31, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-06-30 at 12:15 +0100, John Emmas wrote:
> > My question is this...  is there a way to build ALL the ccg and hg
> > files
> > in a given folder using just a single command?
> [snip]
>
> But why would you want to do this if you can just use the tarball, which
> provides the generated files?

Firstly, whilst it's okay to build one or two libraries from tarballs, 
if I build everything from tarballs it becomes very difficult to keep 
all the libraries up to date.  Things aren't so bad if the library "just 
builds" with MSVC but that's rare for open source libraries.  Often they 
require patches and it becomes a nightmare having to apply all of those 
patches to all of those libraries, month in and month out. Secondly, in 
my experience tarballs don't always have everything in sync.  As an 
example, the latest tarball for glibmm had various source files (all 
beginning with "tls").  The files were referenced in your MSVC build 
projects but were not actually present in the tarballs.  So I couldn't 
have built the MSVC projects from the tarball, even if I'd wanted to 
(well, only by editing the VC projects)

Building from version control gets around all of the above problems, as 
well as allowing me to keep stable branches.  So our release code can 
get built from a stable branch whilst our development code can be using 
the latest bleeding edge stuff which we can be evaluating during 
development.  It's exactly what version control is intended for.  Hope 
that explains it...

John