[ODE] Latest Commit

[Jon Watte (ODE)]

> 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.

You can do this in msdev, using its concept of build order, 
pre-dependencies, and post-actions. We have a script language that 
generates project files and makefiles, depending on what platform we are 
on. We used to have two different generated tools (unit tests, and data 
marshalling) and the dependencies worked just fine. These days, unit 
test is not a separate tool, so we're down to only data marshalling.

> 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.

Actually, you can do this in much the same way you'd do it in a make file.

> Want to target more than Windows?  Two different choices:
> 
> - Don't do it.
> - Don't do it.

Does X-box count as Windows? Does Linux (which I believe you can 
generate for using the Intel compiler) count as Windows?

Seriously, though, MSDEV is mostly single-platform. That's not the 
point. The point is that, when writing multi-platform code, the most 
productive path is to do 99% of your development in MSDEV, and then the 
last percent using the painful tools of GDB.

So, because this is the actual truth for most game developers in the 
world, it would be a bad idea to do anything that makes building ODE in 
MSDEV more painful than it is now.

> 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

Actually, Microsoft is significantly cheaper than most enterprise 
development software was before they showed up. You may be comparing 
with "free," but how "free" is your time?

> 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.

You can, btw, download the MS compiler and linker for free, and you can 
buy the MS IDE and debugger in the "express edition" for a very 
affordable price. But, again, that's beside the point. The productivity 
of MSDEV is such that we'll happily pay the license fee for the full 
product for each programmer on our team.

Cheers,

			/ h+