[Python-Dev] Switching to VC.NET 2003

[Martin v. Loewis]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> At the time of Visual Studio 6, such a "generator" had been written
> by Microsoft, and was part of the VS6 package -- i.e., you could produce
> and save a makefile for the project you had loaded.  Is this no more the case
> for the current release of Visual Studio...?

No. Microsoft has dropped that feature (perhaps they will restore it
in VS.NET 2005 or something :-(

However, it is now simpler to process project files; they are XML
files with a fairly obvious vocabulary (*). A friend of mine once
wrote a generator that produces GNU makefiles out of vcproj files;
such generators tend to be quite application-specific, as they
need to take custom build steps into account, and translate them
properly. Most likely, the generator we would use would not be
useful outside Python.

I would like to see a single makefile generated, instead of one
per project, as the VC6 generator would do; having so many
makefiles is painful. That makefile should have an "all" target
in addition to the targets for the individual projects.

Regards,
Martin

(*) OTOH, the "solution" files (formerly workspaces) don't
use XML syntax, and have changed between VS.NET 2002 and
VS.NET 2003. They would need to be considered as well, as they
contain the inter-project dependencies (including the list
of all projects in the solution).