Re: back branches vs. VS 2008

On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 19:08, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>
>
> On 01/03/2011 12:43 PM, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 18:15, Andrew Dunstan<andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>  wrote:
>>>
>>> The following patch allows me to build the 8.3 and 8.4 branches using
>>> Visual
>>> Studio 2008, once the build system is patched. But I don't really know
>>> why.
>>> HEAD and 9.0 build fine without it. But those branches branches fail with
>>> a
>>> complaint about IPPROTO_IPV6 being undefined.
>>>
>>> The patch seems harmless enough. But I'd like to know why it's happening.
>>> Does anyone have a clue?
>>
>> Umm. Since when do we backpatch new features/platforms?
>>
>> I don't know exactly why that is happening, but it's a good indicator
>> that backpatching it isn't necessarily safe - what else can be missed?
>>
>
> This isn't a new platform, any more than a new version of gcc is a new
> platform. And I certainly don't understand your reference to new features.
> I'm not suggesting backporting one.

It most definitely is a new platform in a *lot* more ways than a new
version of gcc. It's the whole PlatformSDK. Why else did it require
patches to the code?

And it is a new feature *to the msvc build system*.

> I'm not going to maintain more than one buildfarm member doing MSVC, and and
> if we were to adopt your policy I would not be able to use a modern-ish
> version of the compiler/SDK and also build all the live branches. That seems
> quite unnecessary. If we'd backported the changes to support VS2008 when
> they were made a year or two ago, as we should have (the changes are pretty
> trivial), we'd probably have discovered this back then.

Well, it's perfectly possible to have more tha none version of MSVC on
the machine.

And we're not going to be changing the version that's actually used
for the official binary builds, so all you'll accomplish then is to
have the buildfarm test something different form what we're shipping.

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/