[ODE] Latest Commit

[Gary R. Van Sickle]

> What my point is is that, for me, and everyone I've worked 
> with, the MSVC debugger is so much more productive than 
> MinGW/Cygwin that anyone trying the latter is just wasting 
> their money. I can't really take anyone saying that GDB is 
> more useable than MSVC for general application development 
> and debugging seriously. (Each of the tools has some tragic 
> flaw, for sure, but GDB has more of them and a much less 
> responsive UI)

100% agreed on GDB; luckily, I get things right the first time and never
need to use a debugger. ;-)

Where VC falls down (or did last I used it, which was 6.0) is when you have
to do pretty much anything outside its limited notion of a "Project".  Is
part of your project a parser written via flex+bison?  You have two choices:

- Rebuild it every time you do a build.
- Don't do it.

Want to add an automatically-incrementing build number to your project?  Two
choices:

- Have it increment every time you build (via a Cygwin or MinGW sed or perl
script BTW), even if nothing has changed, hence triggering a build (or at
least link) of everything linking to the build number for no reason.
- Don't do it.

Want to build an installer after the build?  Two more choices:

- Build it every time you do a build.
- Don't do it.

Want to target more than Windows?  Two different choices:

- Don't do it.
- Don't do it.

Now maybe ".NET" or whatever they're calling it now has changed all this,
but I somehow suspect not, seeing as the VC environment stayed essentially
exactly the same from versions 4.0 to 6.0 (what, like six years between
those two?).

> I couldn't care less about the politics.

My comment was mainly tounge-in-cheek, I care little for politics myself.
But if Microsoft (or anybody else) is going to rape me with their insane
prices for their development software, I don't think it's unreasonable to
expect equally insane amounts of functionality beyond what I can download
free for the taking.  What I get is a better debugger, and much less
flexibility in playing nice with other tools.

> Well, actually, I do 
> care a little bit: read my rant about UNIX debugging at:
> 
> http://www.mindcontrol.org/~hplus/misc/unix-debugger.html
> 
> Cheers,
>

"Another option is to start over."  Amen brother.

-- 
Gary R. Van Sickle