RE: time to remove Visual Studio project files?

On Sun, 6 Sep 2020, Marcel Raad wrote:

> nmake/winbuild is currently not an option as it lacks a lot of options.

I think this is symptomatic. Among the three primary ways to build for
windows (winbuild, cmake, project files), they all have pros and cons and they
all have a unique set of features and limitations.

For a newcomer, this is not obvious and it certainly is not documented.

I'm not convinced it has to be this way and I'm fairly sure it's not a very
good position. I just don't know how to get out of it.

What's interesting to me if there are *technical* reasons we don't offer the
same feature set with winbuild as we do in the project files. Because if there
isn't any, wouldn't it be better to unite our efforts and bring the most
aomunt of features to one way to build rather to continue having two ways to
do it, neither which is complete?

The same goes for cmake. The limitations in the cmake build are there because
we haven't fixed them, which usually is because the missing features are
instead provided in one of the other ways to build curl. Not because it's not
technically possible to do them with cmake (AFAIK).

Of course, we can take all this to mean that we should keep them all and just
continue to work on trying to improve the winbuild and cmake build systems
over time, like we've done for the last ten or so years. I just don't think
this is a working approach. Nobody will do that, as nobody has done it up
until now. I'm not saying its horrible, but I would like us to do better.

> 4) It still outputs a big fat warning on every CMake run that it's poorly
> maintained, so it just feels like it's experimental and not the recommended
> way to build

If that message is an issue, we could remove it.

It is primarily meant it as a comparison with configure based builds anyway,
it is probably not as relevant for Windows users.

> 5) It's easy to automatically patch the XML project files to compile with
> all warnings enabled (/Wall, corresponds to clang's -Weverything) and only
> the expected warnings disabled as they are per Visual Studio version I could
> live with /W4 though.

Sounds like a feature we want both cmake and the winbuilds to offer...

> I'm happy to check if we can migrate to CMake, but I'm not sure if a week
> will be enough for a final decision.

There's no fixed deadline. I mentioned *at least* a week, and I intended it
for the case nobody would object.

I think the trajectory is more important than a set date.

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