Re: [PATCH 1/5] Makefile: drop builtins from MSVC pdb list

> Hi Peff,
> 
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2020, Jeff King wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 11:04:28AM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 10:57:19AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
>>>> Over the years some more programs have become builtins, but nobody
>>>> updated this MSVC-specific section of the file (which specifically says
>>>> that it should not include builtins). Let's bring it up to date.
>>>>
>>>> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
>>>> ---
>>>> Given that nobody has mentioned this, it makes me wonder if anybody is
>>>> even using this part of the Makefile at all these days. Or maybe having
>>>> extra lines here isn't a problem (though it's also missing some entries,
>>>> like one for git-bugreport).
>>>
>>> If having extra entries didn't cause a problem, I would suspect that it
>>> was just that. But that missing entries *also* doesn't cause a problem,
>>> I'd suspect that this section of the Makefile just isn't being used.
>>>
>>> Of course, I'm not using it since I'm not on Windows, but maybe dscho or
>>> Stolee would know if there are legitimate uses. Of course, if there
>>> aren't, I'm favor of getting rid of this section entirely.
>>
>> I cc'd Jeff Hostetler, who added it. :)
>>
>> I'm also pretty not-knowledgeable about Windows, but I think that
>> anybody using MSVC would do so through Visual Studio these days. And
>> that's being covered with recent cmake stuff. Or maybe I'm just
>> clueless. We'll see.
> 
> We have a couple ways to build Git on Windows:
> 
> - the standard way, in a Git for Windows SDK (which is a slightly modified
>    subset of MSYS2). This uses GCC and GNU make and all the things that you
>    might suspect given Git's origins on Linux.
> 
> - the Visual Studio way, after running `make vcxproj` in Git for Windows'
>    SDK. As part of the `vcxproj` target, the non-C parts of Git are
>    generated and committed.
> 
> - the "new" Visual Studio way, after running CMake. The non-C parts are
>    generated through CMake, which is nice because no Git for Windows SDK is
>    required to build this from start to finish.
> 
> - the Visual C way, as championed by Jeff (and which was a prerequisite to
>    working on the `vcxproj` target): in a Git for Windows SDK, use GNU make
>    but replace GCC by MSVC (via the command-line): `make MSVC=1`.

> 
> While all four methods work, the only one that is regularly used with the
> `make install` command is the first one.
> 
> The location you modified is in the `MSVC` part of `compat.mak.uname`,
> i.e. in the Visual C part.
> 
> We originally had a tentative plan to eventually, maybe, build Git for
> Windows using Visual C by default. However, it turned out that the
> standard malloc in Visual C's runtime was tuned for other workloads than
> Gits, and that nedmalloc performed better, and we originally could not get
> nedmalloc to compile with a modern Visual C, so we stopped that effort.
> 
> That's why you still have support for `make MSVC=1 install`.
> 
> Since it seems not to be too much trouble, I would prefer to keep it
> working for now, even if it is rarely exercised and regressions might
> creep in (like the ones you fixed).
> 
> Thanks,
> Dscho
>