[vtkusers] am I missing something, everything is dificult building under windows

[William A. Hoffman]

At 12:38 AM 4/22/2002 -0700, Randy Dawson wrote:
>There is no technical information here, it's a rant, so ignore unless
>you want to commiserate.

Some technical information would be helpful in making VTK easier to use.

>why are there no native Visual c++ build files for the windows
>environment?

They are much to hard to maintain.  Also which one?  Visual studio 6,7 or nmake?


>Cmake with the build examples switch on does not make the c examples.

The examples are stand alone, and are there to show an example of how you would
write programs that use VTK, but are not part of VTK.  If testing is on, there
are several programs built by default including Mace which is very simple.


>I have read the FAQ, and the mail list.  I see that many suffer as I do,
>trying to build cone.cxx and must specifically specify the build
>environment, compiler switches, include paths and libraries, all through
>the horrible MS gui.  Now add MS foundation classes to the situation,
>and I see the mail list messages double.

I am a bit confused here, you say that you want native Visual C++ build files, but
now you are complaining that you have to use the MS GUI.
With CMake, you can use either the command line nmake, or the visual studio IDE.
You should not have to specify a single path in the MS GUI IF you are using cmake.


>Of course, its a path here or there, a missing switch, a download, patch
>or two, shared libs or not, but it should not be this way.  We should
>have a pre-built, tested  vtk native microsoft project definition just
>like any other visual c++ project.

There are pre-built VTK libraries, and cmake can generate projects that use
them.


Do you have a specific problem?   IF you had trouble, perhaps it is a bug
that can be fixed.   


-Bill