[RFC 0/4] Fix the Visual Studio 2008 .sln generator

Potential Windows developers are likely to be using Visual Studio as their IDE. The tool stack required for Windows can be tortuous as it crosses the boundaries between platforms and philosophies. This RFC seeks to maintain the tools that could assist such developers. In particular, those tools that generate an initial Visual Studio project (.sln ) file.

The .sln generator in contrib began to break when internationalisation introduced an extra -o option. This recently worsened with the addition of invalidcontinue.obj for 'improved POSIX compatibility'.

I hacked a bit when I first attempted to use the VS IDE and noticed the i18n issue. I didn't completely solve all my issues because of further issues with VS2010 Express, so no patches were submitted at the time.

Now, with a fresh copy of VS20008 Express, I see the additional problem of the addition of the invalidcontinue.obj reference causing the .sln generation to fail.

Are the patches going in the right direction? Is the processing of the .obj file in engine.pl sensible? and the extra care with s/\.o$/.c/ avoiding s/obj/cbj/. Does it affect the Qmake capability? (I've no idea) Is the quoting of filenames correct? (my perl foo is cargo cult!)

I've also updated the vcbuild/README to mention Msysgit (which will be replaced soon by the newer/better Git-for-windows/SDK (https://github.com/git-for-windows/sdk), but the benefits still apply.

I've cc'd those who have contributed or patched the engine.pl, or appear to be interested via a $gmane search, who can hopefully comment.

Obviously, the patches will need squashing together, and the commit message(s) tidied after inclusion of comments.

Philip Oakley (4):
  Fix i18n -o option in msvc engine.pl
  Properly accept quoted space in filenames
  engine.pl: split the .o and .obj processing
  Improve layout and reference msvc-build script

 compat/vcbuild/README          | 29 +++++++++++++++++++++--------
 contrib/buildsystems/engine.pl | 38 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
 2 files changed, 51 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)