Re: ./configure fails to link test program due to missing dependencies

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Sep 29, 2024, 17:56 UTC
Message-ID: <39508a38-d98f-3883-3887-971385a3805a@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqv7yil70d.fsf@gitster.g>

Hi Junio,

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On 25/09/2024 07:04, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> >> On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 02:02:34AM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote:
> >>
> >>> I'm probably biased, but some of these failure modes are *weird*.
> >>> And they basically never require the CMakeLists.txt to do something
> >>> considered non-idiomatic in order to trigger the issue.
> >>
> >> All of this is very valuable data to make my case for Meson instead
> >> of CMake. Appreciated, thanks!
> >
> > One thing to bear in mind is why our CMakeLists.txt was introduced in
> > the first place [1]. Visual Studio's CMake integration means that so
> > long as git-for-windows is installed building git is simply a case of
> > clicking on a button, there is no need to install extra software or
> > plugins. I'm not sure the same is true for meson and I don't think we
> > want to end up supporting both.
>
> Is CMake the _only_ thing that is integrated into Visual Studio? Are
> there other possible candidates that could also be used to build for
> non-Windows and is usable by this project?

There is one other build system that is highly integrated into Visual Studio, and that is MSBuild, using `.vcxproj` files. I do not need three guesses to find out what you think about porting Git over to that system.

Other than that, there really is only CMake support: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/cmake-projects-in-visual-studio

Meson came up as an alternative, so the obvious question is whether it could be used conveniently from within Visual Studio. It takes but one look at https://mesonbuild.com/Using-with-Visual-Studio.html to see that no, the instructions ask the developed to use a command-line interface, which is the opposite of integrating well with an IDE.

In short: If we're serious that we want to stop treating Windows-based developers as if they were unwanted here, we'll need to stick to CMake.

Ciao, Johannes