[CMake] Problem with Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7 64bit

[David Doria]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 9:14 AM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A colleague mentioned that with the same setup he was getting the same
>> error, and then installed SP1 for VS 2010 and things started working.
>
> I also remember that Visual Studio 2012 RTM had an optimizer bug that
> caused Qt applications to crash so the first thing I always do after
> installing VS 2010 is install SP1.
>
> John

Is there a way to have CMake detect this sort of thing and say "It is
not working, and it looks like it is because you are using VS2010
without SP1."? These are the kinds of errors that users don't mind
seeing as much. The error that I posted in the first email of this
thread means nothing to the average user and causes major headaches.

Also, I don't think it should depend on the user having installed VS
with any particular environment settings - the typical case I run into
is someone who already is perfectly happy with their VS setup that I
tell to use CMake to do something. They then run into these problems
and shouldn't have to reinstall it just to use CMake. Perhaps a guide
to "how to setup your environment so that VS still works as usual but
CMake is also happy" would be a nice addition, or even a button in
CMake somewhere to "Setup the environment to allow VS to be found
properly". Linux users are annoyed but often know what to do when you
ask them to manipulate environment variables, but in my experience
Windows users (of course not Windows open source devs, but typical
Windows users) don't even know where to go to change environment
variables, so asking them to get them right manually doesn't seem like
a good plan.

David