[CMake] converting VS projects to CMake

[Jesper Eskilson]

Brandon Van Every wrote:
> Someone asked me the other day why CMake doesn't do this.  I thought I
> gave him a reasonable answer, that it would be painful to do, and that
> CMake --> native is a much easier problem than native --> CMake.  But
> I said I would ask here for other people's opinions on it.  I have
> experience converting a large Autoconf + GMake project to CMake.  At
> the time I used piles upon piles of regular expressions.  I can think
> of more sophisticated ways to do the parsing and translation.  But no
> matter what technology is chosen, it's a lot of work.  I'm sure the
> same would be true for MSVC, plus MSVC changes its format every few
> years.  Does MSVC pose any other special difficulties, other than
> sheer mind-numbingness of translation?

Having written a naive ruby-script which does little more than just 
extract the source files for you, there a number of difficulties. For 
example:

- Handling post/pre-build commands.
- Handling file-specific options/settings.

Getting to 95% is probably doable with a lot of (mind-numbing) work, 
getting to 100% is probably impossible. There is always another 
pathological case one wouldn't be able to handle.

-- 
/Jesper