Includes status, proposed strategies. Newest entries are at the top.
February 9, 2009
Checked out the vs_revamp branch from the SCons code repository. Original plan was to use my existing 1.2.0 SCons installation and copy the new Windows stuff from vs_revamp into our site_tools/site_scons directory, but that failed in a mysterious way. Running vs_revamp in place according to instructions in a README file worked, but was not immediately compatible with invoking it from GoGui. Next I tried installing vs_revamp just as one would install the trunk (Subversion-speak for main branch) but couldn't get that to work either. By writing a little .bat file wrapper I am now able to run the vs_revamp version of SCons from GoGui; that is, I can get as far with it as I can by invoking it from the command line. That isn't very far at the moment because I can't reach the SLAC V disk, where the external libraries are. (There was a notice about problems with Windows servers today which, in theory, should not have touched any of the resources I need.)
Summary: After quite a bit of thrashing, net result is a small step forward.
February 2, 2009
The SCons developers are working on a better way to determine proper environment on Windows, depending on VS version. The idea is to find the appropriate set-up file (called something like vsvars32.bat), run it in a special subprocess starting with minimal environment and recover the output environment. This sounds like a much more robust and less-convoluted approach which we should certainly follow. I'm looking into how to get the relevant files, which exist only in a developement branch in their code repository.
January 30, 2009
With a newer version of VS installed on my machine, 7.1 (= VS 2003) is no longer the default. Had to make a couple small changes to SConstruct and to GoGui to recover the ability to build with 7.1 when that is not the default VS version.
Integrating Tracy's work into a local (in site_scons/site_tools) version of the msvs builder is easy; adding support for VS 9.0 turns out to be more difficult than expected. The SCons version of msvs and another related builder, msvc, includes a lot of code specific to various VS versions to find where Studio is installed, what belongs in include and lib path, etc. These things are different for each Studio version. Although VS 8.0 and 9.0 are similar in some ways, including project file format, the directory layout and registry layout are different. New code is needed to handle the 9.0 layout.
Heather made versions of swig, python and ROOT in directories labeled vc90, including at least those parts used by SCons to do builds. It's adequate for a mini-container with just the facilities package, enough to keep me going for quite a while.
January 8, 2009
Installed Express edition of VS 9.0. Since SCons as distributed does not specifically support it, plan is to
- add support for VS 9.0
- integrate work done by Tracy into the SCons msvs builder to improve project files part-way
- make more comprehensive improvements to msvs builder to get all files desired into project without hard-coding and to make multi-project solution files.
Mid-December 2008
SCons as distributed supports builds with Visual Studio 2003 (and should also with Studio 2005 but I haven't tried it), but generates project and solution files which are inadequate in several respects. Since format of project files changed substantially after VS 2003 and since Windows users would like to move forward, the decision has been made to work on project files, etc., only for VS 2008 (aka version 9.0).