On Wed, 2 Apr 2014, Steve Holme wrote:

>> Well, yes since I removed the */Makefile.vc* files.
>
> I don't believe the VC tags in makefile.dist have anything to do with the
> makefile.vc* files - but I could be wrong as I've only used the makefile.vc*
> files a couple of times just to ensure they work ;-)

They do. Makefile.dist has a bunch of makefile targets that all do things like
this:

  vc:
         cd lib
         nmake /f Makefile.$(VC) cfg=release
         cd ..\src
         nmake /f Makefile.$(VC)

... where $(VC) is a variable holding the vc version string. So yes, it'll
just use the Makefile.vc* files in src/ and lib/ to do the build.

We can thus change the relevant targets in Makefile.dist to instead invoke the
makefile in winbuild/. I'll offer that change _before_ I remove any files as a
sort of backup to break less things in one go! =)

Then when that works, we can probably insert the winbuild/ logic into
Makefile.dist but that's then just a technical detail since it'll still work
the same.

> Then in time (hopefully I'm going to start pushing my Visual Studio project
> files this month for the 7.37 release) we move the winbuild\makefile
> functionality into makefile.dist and remove the winbuild directory to give
> us Windows targets via:
>
> * Native Visual Studio project files
> * Makefile.dist (either directly with nmake or through testcurl.pl)
> * cmake
> * autoconf (?) via mingw

I want us to deprecate the cmake build system since I believe it mostly
confuses users and distracts them into thinking they can actually use that to
build a curl/libcurl version in similar style that configure or the makefile
based builds can do but it is just so inferior in comparison.

I've always had and expressed my doubt for accepting the cmake build files
into our source tree, and I believe time has proven all my concerns proven and
accurate.

But I'll take that in a separate thread later on.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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