Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@xxxxxx> writes: >> > The change that Dscho suggested was meant for those people that run >> > CMake in same directory of source dir, which is mostly discouraged >> > in CMake land. > > It is discouraged, but not disallowed. > ... >> > I think the original CMake proposal didn't touch .gitignore because >> > they run in a separated build-dir. >> >> If so, not only my "do we need a matching change to CMakeLists to >> teach how to clean crufts?" becomes unnecessary, but the original >> patch that started this thread to touch .gitignore at the top level, >> does, too. >> >> I wonder what led Dscho not to follow the "create a 'build' dir and >> do things there" practice. Judging from the fact that the "because >> they run in a separate build directory" assumption did not hold to >> somebody as experienced as Dscho, it is likely others would do the >> same. > > That's because Dscho does not like the separate build directory, even if > they know that in the CMake world, it is kind of expected. Sorry, but that does not sound like a convincing excuse because ... > It's just that it would be super convenient for Visual Studio users to > just generate their project files in-place. That's why I started down that > road. > ... > Ideally, we would tell Visual Studio users to "just install CMake, start > its GUI, direct it to the Git source, configure and generate". Alas, it is > not that easy: > > - The `SH_EXE` is not found by default (`C:\Program Files\Git\bin\sh.exe` > should be used in the vast majority of the cases), > - If the build directory is left unspecified, the non-writable `C:\Program > Files\CMake\bin` directory is used, > - The `compat\vcbuild\vcpkg` system is not initialized automatically, and > even if the user initialized it, the dependencies (such as expat, zlib) > are still not found. ... if the build directory needs to be specified anyway, there don't seem to be a big difference between telling them to create an empty build place and use it and telling them to point at the source tree itself, so ... > I would like to make things easier, and forcing users to use a separate > build directory (that needs to be outside of the Git source tree because > our `.gitignore` does not handle it well) would go the other direction, I > fear. ... the above sounds like the argument concentrates too much on where the build directory is (i.e. between "in place" and "a throw-away directory next door"), which sounds like much smaller point compared to the other things that needs to be improved in the VS users. And making a choice against what is recommended as best practice...? I dunno.
