visual studio ide problems

[William A. Hoffman]

At 04:58 PM 4/14/2006, William A. Hoffman wrote:
>There are some PATH issues with visual studio and kdelibs.
>
>To successfully build kdelibs with the ide, you have to have perl
>and the qt dll's in your PATH during the build.  The visual studio
>IDE has its own environment.  It can be set, but it is not a common
>thing to do.  (In fact, I am not even sure where the menu is to
>set the PATH, but I am sure I could find it.)   So, most developers
>will run cmake, then load the solution and try to build.   They will
>get errors, and give up.  Even if you run the IDE from a shell, it does not get
>that environment.   I have some ideas for fixes:
>
>1. For windows, every tool that is run during the build, gets run
>from a driver .bat file.  The driver bat file is a configured 
>file that has the correct paths built into it.   
>
>kdewindriver.bat ${KDE4_DCOPIDL2CPP_EXECUTABLE} ....
>
>kdewindriver.bat ${KDE4_DCOPIDL_EXECUTABLE}  ....
>
>It would work with the nmake and ide builds reducing the environment
>setup needed to run the build.
>
>2. I add some sort of global variable that allows you to set PATH
>in ALL custom commands in CMake.  It is possible in a custom command
>to do set PATH=c:/perl/bin;%PATH% as part of the command.
>
>SET(CMAKE_CUSTOM_COMMAND_WINDOWS_PATH  /path/to/qt/bin;/path/to/perl)
>
>This would work only with VS IDE.
>
>pros:  It is a small fix to cmake.
>cons:  It is specific to only one generator.
>
>This is much like the rpath problem on unix.
>I am thinking that 1 maybe a better way to go.
>Any other ideas?

I have another idea.   Perhaps this is similar to the RPATH problem.
Maybe a cmake script should be used to launch kde programs during
the build process.   So, kde4_exec_via_sh should not be a shell
script, but rather a .cmake script run with cmake -P.

For windows this script would set PATH, and for unix it would set
_library_path_variable.

-Bill