Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Re: compile problem by using VC++

[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 02:45:38PM -0500, Mike Frisch wrote:
> There is *no* difference between what you call MS Visual C and VC++.
> They are one and the same.  The C++ compiler compiles C code too.

I've updated "README.win32" to refer to "Visual C++" rather than "Visual
C"; perhaps that'll prevent further confusion.

> The directions for compiling Ethereal from the command-line are spot on
> and, in my experience, work as advertised.  To my knowledge, there is
> not an official Developer Studio project file for Ethereal.  I imagine
> part of the reason for it not being in the tree is that it would be
> difficult to keep the UNIX build scripts in sync with the Win32 project
> file.

Yes, that'd require manual updates to the project file, as not everybody
adding source files to Ethereal has MSVC++.  It is possible to manually
update project files - I've done that for tcpdump and libpcap when
adding files (the current CVS version includes stuff from WinDump and
WinPcap) - but it's probably more error-prone.

I also don't know how well MSVC++ handles generating .c and .h files
from other files, as we do for some source files.

It might be possible to handle this with CMake:

	http://www.cmake.org/

as mentioned a while ago by David Frascone, although that does add One
More Tool to the requirements list, and there might be things we need
that it doesn't do.  I don't know whether it can work with all the GNU
auto* stuff, or whether the Makefiles it generates have all the same
sorts of targets that automake-generated Makefiles do - if it requires
people to install CMake just to download a source release and build it,
that's not acceptable.