[Openchemistry-developers] LibXML2 ExternalProject and Visual Studio 2015 Community

[Rob McDonald]

I maintain a separate open source project that uses a CMake build
system that is somewhat similar to that of Open Chemistry.  I make
heavy use of ExternalProject_Add to handle dependencies, have a
SuperBuild, etc.

When I set up our build system (Jan 2014 or so), I borrowed liberally
from your External_libxml2.cmake.  This was back when LibXML2 was at
version 2.7.8.  I have happily been using Visual Studio 2010 Express
and now Professional.

Some new developers have joined our project and are trying to use
Visual Studio 2015 Community.

The existing build system complains extensively (and fails) about some
snprintf macro definitions.  I noticed that your project has updated
to 2.9.1 and has tweaked the build system in the process.

I did my best to match those updates -- and still got the snprintf
problems.  I updated libxml2 to 2.9.3 (the latest) and the snprintf
problems all went away -- great news.  Unfortunately, I now run into
problems with many unresolved external symbols during the link step.

My system is a little different than yours (I go to great lengths to
force static linking and also disable a few more options than you do),
but it is similar enough that I thought it was worth asking here.

Has anyone in your project tried building with Visual Studio 2015
Community?  Have you run into these problems?

Thanks for any help,

Rob