Building kdelibs with VS 2005 (patch)

[Manuel Klimek]

> nmake is different to gnu make in terms of arguments and behaviour. It's
> only
> similar to gnu make.

Ack. Perhaps my statement wasn't clear...

> nmake is used internally by any version of VS - you can even see it in the
> log
> window of the GUI. Both ways of compiling is the same, the only difference

I only know what happens with visual studio 2005, but when I use the
visual studio 2005 IDE, I don't see any hint that it uses nmake
internally. There
is no nmake process running and I can't find any nmake Makefiles. As far
as I know the visual studio IDE uses a new process called "msbuild" as of
visual studio 2005. It of course starts a 'cl' process, but no nmake
process (correct me if I'm wrong).

Cmake can generate nmake compatible Makefiles or visual studio
project files. nmake Makefiles state the dependencies and outputs in a
completely different way than visual studio project files and have
different issues.

Visual studio project files definitely have the issue that you can't have
two source files with the same name (and different extensions) that compile
to different object files. This is addressed by my patch.

> Of course it may be good idea to support GUI while compiling KDE
> _applications_, but kdelibs compilation proces itself is too complex and
> multistage, IIRC, to play with GUI.

I didn't encounter other errors than the source file name clash in the print
module. The rest compiled and linked just fine. With my patch everything
compiles and links from the IDE.

The only issue is that debug and release libraries have the same name and
I can't build both in one build tree with the visual studio IDE. I think
this would be a nice feature to support (just my opinion).
And I think you'll make developing easier this way, too, for new developers
if you can compile everything from within the IDE...
To support my ideas, I'm willing to help.

Off topic information about me:
I'm developing xpertmud and am currently porting it to kde 4 on windows.

Cheers,
Manuel