On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 11:50, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Many projects also orient themselves towards GNU Autoconf, which again
> is problematic in a pure MSVC environment. 

Hahahah :) Autoconf doesn't even work on Linux!

> I think the Python community is strengthened in this regard.  Seemingly
> they can run their stuff on all the platforms, they really don't have to
> care much at all which platform it's on.  

Python worked pretty well cross platform, with some care,
for pure Python code for quite some time -- but with distutils
the transparency is enhanced to include C extensions which is a
pretty major leap forward, since extensions are a vital part
of Python.

In fact, Ocaml is pretty close to this goal already: the
lower level technology is largely in place, and tools
like 'findlib' help with integration. There's just no
top level tool, because to make one requires a standard
package architecture (way of installing things so they
get found and built if necessary).

INRIA would probably say "that's not our problem".

> Gimme a break.  I put a *HUGE* learning curve into GNU Make, once upon a
> time.  It's not simple, it's just familiar to a lot of UNIXen.  Ok, it's
> simple for trivially sized projects.  When you start getting into
> multiple directories, auto-generating dependencies, and keeping debug
> vs. release builds separated from one another, you end up doing tons of
> manual labor that IDEs like Visual Studio simply solve.

I doubt IDE's solve this -- they simply provide an interactive
management facility with a higher level of automation, but the price
is that extending them is much harder: they don't scale either,
they just break later :)

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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