[opensource-dev] autobuild setting UNATTENDED questions

[Ima Mechanique]

Thanks for replying Brad

> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Ima Mechanique <
> ima.mechanique at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to find out more information about this setting and the piece
> > of code it controls. Non Windows devs can switch off now as it only
> > affects them by causing a warning about it not being used.
> >
> > 1) Is it still needed. All configurations, even the TC ones, have it
> > defaulting to off. This causes problems for VCE devs as the vstools
> > program controlled by it causes an error for them.
> > It's purpose appears to be to set the working directory for running the
> > .exe. However, the .exe runs just fine without it being set.
> >
> 
> 
> The working directory setting may no longer be necessary after this
> change<https://bitbucket.org/merov_linden/viewer-autobuild2010/changeset/339c25d7046e>.
> If so, that's good news.  However, I believe that we also use it for setting
> the default configuration to RelWithDebInfo, which we still require.

Could you expand on this? I'm assuming the "it" is vstool or UNATTENDED,
but the only other references to either I can find in the source tree
are part of the autobuild.xml configuration for Debug, RelWithDebInfo,
and Release (which do seem to be setting configuration type for startup).
If that is what you're referring to, then the CMakeLists.txt part could
be safely removed and OS devs could remain happily oblivious to its use?

> 2) If it really is necessary, could we change the program run (vstools)
> > to something more compatible with all VC versions. Now the project files
> > are XML based, it should be possible to do this as part of autobuild
> > itself.
> >
> >
> The source for vstool is
> here<https://bitbucket.org/merov_linden/viewer-autobuild2010/src/tip/indra/tools/vstool/main.cs>.
> (Yes, it's C#, don't ask me...)  If there's a way to make it compatible with
> VCExpress I'd love to do so, but to my knowledge VCExpress doesn't expose
> the macro apis that this relies upon, so it's likely impossible to directly
> extend that script to this case.  I don't think it makes sense to build
> support for tweaking these xml files into autobuild, as autobuild is
> intended to be as fully decoupled from the details of individual build
> systems as possible.

Agreed about autobuild, I was thinking something like a python script
that autobuild/cmake could use instead of vstool. However, it seems
this is unnecessary now.

> An alternative is getting this kind of feature built into cmake.  For
> example, this issue <http://public.kitware.com/Bug/view.php?id=8884> is a
> feature request for making another kind of modification to the
> *.vcproj.*.user configuration file where these settings are saved.
> 
> In the mean time, I would definitely recommend updating the VCExpress
> configurations to pass -DUNATTENDED:BOOL=ON on the command line until we
> find a better solution for this. 

Already done and in my repo, although it's not a "VC Express"
configuration it's for any OS VC 2010

> We used to do a lot more with the
> --unattended argument to develop.py, but I think this is all that remains of
> that cruft, so it's safe to use for this purpose.

So if the autobuild.xml is what you were referring to above,  could we safely
remove all references to UNATTENDED (TC and OS), and remove lines 1581 -
1594 from indra/newview/CMakeLists.txt?

> -Brad

--
Ima Mechanique
ima.mechanique(at)blueyonder.co.uk