Includes status, proposed strategies. Newest entries are at the top.
March 10, 2009
Addendum to March 9th entry: have confirmed that, when the PATH variable is augmented to include SCons lib directory, applications like test_Util.exe will run inside Studio.
To Do, a partial list
- Figure out what needs to be in a library project file to get Studio to copy the library to the SCons variant lib directory (same place the library gets installed when built by SCons).
- Get SCons to create a usable environment-setter-upper, probably a .bat file that can be run before invoking devenv.
- Currently only .cxx files are added to projects. Need .h, possibly also xml, python, etc.
- The .cxx files in the project are specified using an absolute file path. This allows Studio to find the files, but means that the project files are not portable. They must be built where used. Should either
- figure out how to express path in terms of an environment variable which translates to the root of the container. This environment variable then needs to be defined when the setup file is run.
- or make a special SCons target for an installation which only regenerates all project and solution files.
- Don't know how to make a solution file referencing all the projects in a package. When I try the obvious thing from within SCons, invoking MSVSSolution( ), the resulting file uses paths to the SCons build area rather than real destination of the file. The ones in the build area are not (and are not intended to be) usable as project files. When I tried adding a second project to a solution file from within Studio it balked.
- Is it possible to encode dependency information of one project on another in a project file? If so, get SCons to add this information to the project files.
March 9, 2009
Can now generate a project file for facilities library which almost does the right thing (everything except for putting outputs where I thought I asked it to) and project files for facilities apps which link but don't run, probably because PATH doesn't include directory of facilities.lib
Concerns in previous entry have not gone away. I have made some guesses about where build products should go and to what extent the two build systems share files, but
- Haven't quite implemented what I'm after
- Am not confident these guesses can be extrapolated to cover a realistic development installation with many packages and possibly an override directory.
March 5, 2009
Accomplished some clarification by adding more information to variant names. SCons variant now incorporates compiler (e.g. instead of redhat4-i686-32bit-Debug on Linux will now get redhat4-i686-32bit-gcc34-Debug; on Windows now get
XP-i386-32bit-vc90-Debug). Project files also include a name called the 'variant'. It now looks just like the SCons variant except it starts with Visual, e.g. Visual-vc90-Debug.
However problems involving directory structure, interactions between SCons builds and Studio builds are looming. The work areas - where intermediates like object files get built - are distinct and probably should remain so. But what about the install area? SCons builds both refer to it when searching for include files or libraries and write to it. If link commands issued by Studio are to be roughly analogous to those used by SCons, it has to do the same thing. In this case, should it use the same install area or a separate one? (I would think the same.) How do I tell Studio to copy libraries to the install area? What about public sources; that is, the files that go in the top-level include, xml, etc., directories?
March 4, 2009
Inching forwards.. Project file produced now can be used by Studio to make a .def file (needed at link time to export everything we want exported) which looks more or less reasonable, though smaller than the one SCons makes with its "native" build. However the prelink command is probably still not quite right. It's using the objects build by SCons as input rather than the objects Studio built. Should be able to fix Have fixed this with more tinkering, but the total amount of tinkering going on is unsettling at best.
March 2, 2009
Found a useful variable kept by SCons for compiler options and made use of it in writing out project file so that all compile options, most importantly including INCLUDE directories, are handled in a general fashion. Resulting project file for facilities can be used to compile all .cxx source. There are still several obstacles to using it to build the library.
Made a new module, users/jrb/minimalDev, in the CVS respository for ongoing work on SCons machinery (SConstruct, registerObjects.py, etc.) for Windows. Since it's dependent on SCons-1.2.0.d20090223 it's not compatible with production versions of these files.
February 26, 2009
Installed SCons release 1.2.0.d20090223 - much easier to deal with than working off a development branch.
Committed some minor changes to SConstruct for support of Windows:
- added line to create manifest files
- added to and rationalized compiler option lines
- added --vc9 option.
February 24, 2009
Have installed VS 2008 Professional. SCons finds it correctly when --vc9 option is used. Problems detected so far in the project and solution files that get written [and estimate of difficulty to fix] include
Extra stuff at the end of the .vcproj file and the .sln file which appears to be for the private use of SCons, as SCons central expects these files to be used: that is, coerce Studio into calling SCons to do the actual build. It may be harmless (or maybe not; it might have accounted for some of the strangeness I saw yesterday) but, for the kind of project files we're aiming for, it's certainly not useful. Eliminate it. [easy]
Solution file version should be 10.0, not 9.0 [easy]
Warnings when I try to build the project about incompatible compile options [easy to medium]
No user include paths [medium or worse]
There are certainly many more; I just haven't gotten there yet.
One piece of good news: the code in the vs_revamp branch has been merged into the trunk and is available in release 1.2.0.d20090223.
February 23, 2009
First attempts to bring up VS 2008 Express on project and solution files generated by SCons (with Tracy's additions) have been somewhat bizarre: VS claims it needs to convert them. It makes a new solution file and leaves the project file alone. However, if I exit and restart, it doesn't like the solution file it just made and claims the project file has syntax problems! I'm in the process of installing VS 2008 Professional, in hopes that it will behave better, and also because Professional is the real target environment, not Express.
February 12, 2009
Can now build and run with 9.0. Link problem for debug was solved by specifying compile flag /MDd rather than /MD (thanks, Heather, for the hint). The inability to run was because manifest files created by the 9.0 linker were not getting installed. When I copied them to the proper place, all was well. Navid found mention of a variable WINDOWS_INSERT_MANIFEST in the SCons documentation which, when set to 'true', causes the manifest files to be installed automatically.
February 11, 2009
Was able to successfully build facilities non-debug, but couldn't run applications. Error message was "This application has failed to start because MSVCR90.dll was not found".
MSVCR90 (and a couple other libraries with similar names) are part of the Express 9.0 distribution. On my machine they can be found in directory
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\redist\x86\Microsoft.VC90.CRT
The debug versions are in a nearby Debug_NonRedist directory. I copied them all to C:\WINNT\system32, since that's where similar libraries for other Studio versions are, and rebuilt the applications, but that just changed the error to R6034: "An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly. Please contact the applicatins's support team for more information." ..not too helpful since I am the application's support team. And I still can't even link debug.
February 10, 2009
Windows server problems of yesterday were addressed. Using vs_revamp code from GoGui, can now
- build facilities package using Studio 7.1
- almost build facilities using Studio 9.0
Before I started on the vs_revamp gambit, I could not compile facilities with Studio 9.0 because the include path was missing a directory containing some system include files. That problem is fixed; all the sources in facilities compile successfully. The build now fails while trying to link the library:
Creating library facilities-02-18-02\build\XP-i386-32bit-Debug\facilities.lib and object facilities-02-18-02\build\XP-i386-32bit-Debug\facilities.exp Scheduler.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol __imp___CrtDbgReportW referenced..
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).