[cmake-developers] -GNinja on Windows

[Bill Hoffman]

On 6/6/2012 7:14 AM, Peter Kümmel wrote:
> Here the actual status of the Ninja generator.
>
> The generator now uses Ninja's build-in response support.
>
>
>
> - MSVC10
>
> Dependency checking is still missing as essential feature,
> but the rest is quite good:
>
> The following tests FAILED:
> 82 - BuildDepends (Failed)
> 140 - CTestGTMCoverage (Failed)
> 158 - CTestTestStopTime (Failed)
>
> And it is maybe better on the build server
> (CTestGTMCoverage/CTestTestStopTime)
>
>
>
> - MinGW 4.7
>
> Because 'ar' has problems with \ in response files currently slashes are
> used
> for the patch names, then this ninja patch is needed
>
> https://github.com/martine/ninja/pull/322
>
> Maybe there is a better solution, which would automatically fix a lot of
> unit tests.
Can you bring that up on the ninja mailing list?  Is that a patch that 
could go upstream ninja?

>
> The RC compiler is set now internally and therefore the unit tests could
> be run:
>
> The following tests FAILED:
> 36 - CxxOnly (Failed)
...

> I assume most errors are because of '/' '\' mismatch.
>
>
> I propose to also enable Ninja on Windows this would give as more feedback
> and maybe we also get some bug fixes. And nobody is forced to use the ninja
> generator.
>

Sorry, no can do.  If it is there, people will expect it to work for 
their project.  Right now it is not working, so I don't want to enable 
it.  The only feedback we will get, is these things are broken.  We know 
what is broken, what more feedback do we need?

To move forward on windows, I will change the dashboard to use ninja 
master.  Right now it is still using your branch on git and is failing a 
bunch of tests. Also, it sounds like we took a step backwards with MinGW 
and the response files.  Maybe until we figure that out we should 
disable response files for MinGW?

Perhaps we can try one of the forks that has depend information for 
MSVC?  If one of those works and the BuildDepends test passes, and we 
can get MinGW back into working shape, then we can enable ninja for Windows.

-Bill