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

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Mon, 2013-07-01 at 12:55 +0100, John Emmas wrote:
> 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.

This is terribly unwise. Those tarballs contain files that you need, as
you see.

>  Secondly, in 
> my experience tarballs don't always have everything in sync.

If a tarball has a problem, please report the bug so it can be fixed.

>   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, the MSVC build files need to be corrrected. Why not just do that and
submit the correction back upstream

>   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...

You seem determined to make things difficult for yourself.

-- 
murrayc murrayc com
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