Re: msvc and vista fun

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
> Dave Page wrote:
>>
>>> Perhaps someone would like to tell me how I can remedy these
>>> problems. More importantly, this should be in an FAQ or some such.
>>> Also, I would like to know if we have really tested out on Vista the
>>> privilege surrendering code that is is supposed to work in Windows.
>>> It looks to me like it might not be working.
>>
>> What makes you say that?
>
>
> It was just a suspicion, but maybe the fact that the admin user can't
> run while the non-admin user can indicates that it is working (possibly
> too well).

Hmm, yes - I see what you mean. How are you defining 'admin user'? When
I ran into this problem from what I recall I was originally trying to
swim against the Vista security model by using the Administrator account
which is disabled by default (for anyone still doubting that from the
last discussion on the topic, please see
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsvistasecurity/archive/2006/08/27/windowsvistasecurity-.aspx).
It went away when I started using my own user account which is not 'the'
administrator, but is a member of the administrators group.

> I am not only concerned about the buildfarm, but about the robustness,
> maintainability and simplicity of the build process. Having to have a
> completely separate build system for msvc is really quite sucky.

Well, yes, but unfortunately there's not really any other way to get a
halfway decent development environment on Windows. Mingw/Msys are
horrendously maintained - mingw still doesn't work without hacking on
Vista as you've found, and msys doesn't work at all on 64 bit versions
for example (at least it didn't the last few times I tried - it's
possible they've fixed it now). The debugger doesn't work for most
people, and the development environment is just plain nasty to keep up
to date.

Now 99.99% of users don't build on Windows anyway, so I'm not so much
concerned about their ability to maintain and use the build environment
as ours - if that means we have to fix a few bugs in the MSVC scripts
during the dev cycle, so be it. The setup I'm using now for 8.3 is
already orders of magnitude easier to setup and maintain than the
mingw/msys environment, plus we have a decent debugger (and other tools)
now, and the ability to run on 64 bit platforms, not to mention a
compiler with which we can (eventually) build for them as well.

Regards, Dave