RFC: what's the correct behavior for Visual Studio projects and unified builds?

[Nathan Froyd]

Hi all,

When discussing the recent transition to only supporting unified builds,
some people were apparently concerned about how this would affect Visual
Studio projects (i.e. Intellisense), since the Visual Studio project files
generated via |mach build-backend| only listed the individual source files,
and not the unified files that were actually compiled. Bug 1122812[1] was
filed, and I fixed Visual Studio projects to include the unified files
instead of the individual files.

It turns out that this breaks the way some people use Visual Studio
projects (i.e. Intellisense), rather than fixing it, as was the intent.

I confess that I'm not using Visual Studio to develop Firefox, so I'm
looking for people's input:

- What do you use Visual Studio project files for?
- Did bug 1122812 make Intellisense (and related IDE usage) worse or better
for you?

Backing out the problematic change in bug 1122812 isn't a big deal, but I'd
like to understand how people are actually using the project files and what
actually breaks (or continues working) for folks.

Thanks,
-Nathan

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122812

[Chris Pearce]

Breaking VisualStudio Intellisense also broke most of the code
navigation things that make VisualStudio awesome. I don't build with
VisualStudio, I build with the command line because I like to build &&
run, and I like to pipe the output to grep, file, or set environment
variables more easily.

I use the project for Visual Studio's solely for the awesome code
navigation that it enables. Not having that makes me much less
productive. We should backout whatever we have to to fix this. I can't
even configure with --disable-unified-compilation to generate a project
file that works.

Unless someone complains (and I bet they won't given the lack of
response in this thread), we should backout bug 1122812. There are
others on my team affected by this too.


Cheers,
Chris Pearce.

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 3/12/15 5:39 AM, Chris Pearce wrote:
> Breaking VisualStudio Intellisense also broke most of the code
> navigation things that make VisualStudio awesome.

Chris,

So just to make sure the actual question in Nathan's mail is answered:

1) You're saying Intellisense _does_ work in a reasonable way for you
with unified builds without the patch for bug 1122812?

2) You're saying Intellisense does _not_ work in a reasonable way for
you on trunk right now?

> We should backout whatever we have to to fix this.

I think Nathan is trying to figure out what that "whatever" is and is
looking for help from people who use Visual Studio, because he's not in
a position to evaluate its behavior himself.

-Boris

[Nathan Froyd]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 5:39 AM, Chris Pearce <cpe...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Breaking VisualStudio Intellisense also broke most of the code navigation

> things that make VisualStudio awesome. I don't build with VisualStudio, I
> build with the command line because I like to build && run, and I like to
> pipe the output to grep, file, or set environment variables more easily.
>
> I use the project for Visual Studio's solely for the awesome code
> navigation that it enables. Not having that makes me much less productive.
> We should backout whatever we have to to fix this. I can't even configure
> with --disable-unified-compilation to generate a project file that works.
>
> Unless someone complains (and I bet they won't given the lack of response
> in this thread), we should backout bug 1122812. There are others on my team
> affected by this too.

The problematic bit of bug 1122812 has been fixed in bug 1138250, which has
landed on central and should be getting merged around soonish.

-Nathan

[cpe...@mozilla.com]

Intellisense and other code navigation things all work now in the generated project file. This is awesome, thanks!

Chris Pearce.