[vtk-developers] [vtkusers] Can we drop Visual Studio 6 support?

[David Thompson]

> First look: the continuous vs6 platform with this ctest script:
> http://www.cdash.org/CDash/viewNotes.php?buildid=314820 which has
> PARALLEL ON is passing all tests. When you say this works on all other
> platforms, how did verify that?
In order to have a clean dashboard for the recent VTK release, the
buildmaster at Kitware added this to Parallel/Testing/Cxx/CMakeLists.txt

  IF(NOT CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Visual Studio 6")
    SET(MyTests ${MyTests}
      TestMultiBlockExodusWrite.cxx
    )
  ENDIF(NOT CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Visual Studio 6")

That was rev 1.82 on 3/6/2009 so I believe dashboards just before that
should show the test failing.

	David

> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:06 PM, David Thompson <dcthomp at sandia.gov> wrote:
> >> With ITK, if we have a VS6 or Borland or mingw or cygwin or VS7 or SUN
> >> CC or 64 bit ICC or ... problem, we ask someone that has the compiler
> >> to investigate a fix. Some errors are hard to fix without access to a
> >> compiler.
> >>
> >> If you are still having a problem,  I have a VS6 compiler and can try
> >> to track it down for you.
> >
> > Be careful, I might take you up on that. :-) For instance, we have
> > turned off ParallelCxxTests TestMultiBlockExodusWrite on builds using
> > MSVC6 because, while it works on all other platforms and runs cleanly
> > under valgrind on Linux and Mac OS X, garbage gets written to the test
> > file when compiled with MSVC6.
> >
> >        David
> >
> >
> >> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 2:19 PM, David Thompson <dcthomp at sandia.gov> wrote:
> >> >> What sort of maintenance issues are you having?
> >> > This type:
> >> > http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/Common/vtkUnicodeString.cxx?view=log
> >> > There are *many* more examples (perhaps not all as humorously narrated),
> >> > but the general problem is that the dashboard machines are the only way
> >> > for many developers to test whether something will work with MSVC6. It
> >> > can be quite irritating to check in something that should fix a compile
> >> > problem and have to wait 1-2 hours before seeing the result.
> >> >
> >> >> I think the real issue is what compilers do the VTK installed base
> >> >> use? You may have customers that are using 3rd party drivers/libraries
> >> >> that are VS6. Actually, there is no way to know who the customers are.
> >> > It would be nice to assume that customers who continue to develop with
> >> > VTK read at least the digest, but I agree that some may note and it
> >> > could be some time before we hear from them. I still think it is a good
> >> > idea to drop VC6 not because it's irritating to debug build problems but
> >> > because it can lead to obfuscated code as people rewrite bits here and
> >> > there to accommodate old syntax and broken STL implementations.
> >> >
> >> >        David
> >> >
> >> >> On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com> wrote:
> >> >> > Hi folks,
> >> >> >
> >> >> > We are thinking of dropping support for Visual Studio 6. It is causing
> >> >> > annoying maintenance issues since no one in the developer team uses it
> >> >> > and since VS 6 supports only a subset of modern C++ features. Are
> >> >> > there any objects? If yes, I would like to know why.
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Best,
> >> >> > -berk
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