[vtkusers] Can we drop Visual Studio 6 support?

[David Thompson]

> 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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