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Future of the build system

Submitted by kanato on Sat, 08/29/2009 - 11:12

Currently, the build system is built around a custom fork of .NET Prebuild. Mainly the purpose of the custom fork was to fix bugs in Prebuild, since at the time I started working on the build system, there was very little activity on Prebuild and I had found and fixed several bugs in it. I've submitted patches to Prebuild and some of them have been accepted. The main reason for using Prebuild was to allow ease of development on Linux, since Prebuild can generate MonoDevelop project files and Nant build files.

The MonoDevelop support in Prebuild is obsolete since MonoDevelop 2.0 supports Visual Studio project files, and is available in the repositories of major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora), and can be installed on Mac OS X. I'd like to drop Prebuild from the build system, and go back to just including the Visual Studio project files in the repository. There are two major reasons for this: 1) future maintenance will be easier, and 2) Prebuild has no support for generating XNA Game Studio project files, so if an XNA driver is developed it will have to be dealt with somehow. The biggest disadvantage to dropping Prebuild is the loss of support for building AgateLib with Nant, which I don't see as being all that significant.

Thoughts?

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#1Submitted by kanato on Mon, 09/07/2009 - 19:40.

Yeah, that's a good point. I

Yeah, that's a good point. I haven't tried VS2010, and I moved to .NET 3.5 a while back so I dropped support for VS2005, so at the moment it's not an issue. But once it's released I will have to think about this.

#2Submitted by The Fiddler on Mon, 09/07/2009 - 15:16.

The only reason to keep using

The only reason to keep using Prebuild is to maintain compatibility with earlier Visual Studio versions. For example, once you open a solution with VS2010, it won't work with VS2008 any more, which is pretty annoying.

On the other hand, Prebuild is very buggy, so that's not ideal either...

#3Submitted by Tatsu on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 18:05.

it is possable (and fairly

it is possable (and fairly easy) to make a project that is made in Visual Studio 2010 work with Visual Studio 2008, just look for the .suo files within the project, delete them and send your project to the recieving Visual Studio 2008 client, also, another way to shoot down a compatibility problem is to exclude (not delete) the obj directory from any given project to allow interoperability within the programs

#4Submitted by Agon on Sun, 08/30/2009 - 12:51.

Im supporting the drop of

Im supporting the drop of Prebuild. I see one problem in Linux package generation but it is very low.