On Sunday, 1 September 2013 at 20:00:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 9/1/2013 12:38 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
I know you seem to hate automation (because it sometimes
fails), but
having each individual person waste hours on initial setup is
much
worse than having a script which can potentially fail. At
least the
script can be fixed once the bug is reported, and it can be
tested.
Back in the bad old Datalight C days, I relied on the Microsoft
linker which came on the DOS system disks. Unfortunately,
Microsoft constantly changed it, even with the same version of
DOS. Worse, numerous other Microsoft products came with yet
other versions of LINK.EXE.
All those linkers behaved differently.
It was a frackin' nightmare to support customers with them. I
used to have floppy disks packed full of just different
versions of LINK.EXE.
This drove me to get our own linker (BLINK.EXE). While it
wasn't perfect, either, at least I could actually fix problems
with it rather than throwing up my hands in rage being unable
to control the situation.
There's no way we can automate VC 2014 so its unpredictable
configuration will work. All we can do is react after the fact.
I don't hate automation. sc.ini works out of the box with the
default install of VS 2010.
What I need from you guys and your different VS installs is,
for each one, a bug report with what is necessary to get it
installed. Then we can add it to the modern version of my
floppy disk "linker collection".
This can be automated easily enough. The installer can detect
what versions of VS are installed and either set an environment
variable or modify sc.ini (your choice). It could probably be
made forward compatible since Microsoft has been using basically
the same paths and registry keys for every new release since at
least VS 2005. Even if they make a release that the D installer
doesn't properly detect fixing that is a 5 minute job by one
person (probably me) versus requiring every user to spend a half
hour or more (6 hours in Manu's experience) trying to figure out
how to get 64 bit working.
