Bootstrap

[Geoff Evans]

Hi everyone,

I was curious if anyone knows much about the premake bootstrap process... and particularly if anyone had some ideas in mind about simplifying it.  The reason I ask is because it seems pretty expensive, from a broad view at least.  I've switched a couple projects to pull in premake purely via a git submodule (rather than submitting builds of premake for each platform into the consumer's repository "bin" folder), and I have to say it's really nice, save for complications arising from the bootstrap process.  Making bootstrap leaner could be a nice short-term improvement to alleviate some of the issues with being a consumer of premake (like only having premake4-era builds available via linux packages and homebrew on macOS).

On windows that complication is that bootstrap requires devenv.com and the visual studio solution/project upgrade pathway.  Having bootstrap just depend on the visual studio build tools (instead of the full IDE installation) would be a nice simplification, IMO.  That toolchain-only deployment is becoming more popular with with services like travis-ci.org, which recently announced initial windows support, but only supports the build tools out-of-box.  To get things working consumers are going to have to choco install visualstudio2017community, which I can only expect is going to balloon CI times like crazy because vstudio's install is _significant_.

Anyway, I've no doubt there are probably numerous complicating factors at play here, and was curious if anyone in the room would know/share/be willing to discuss before I considered doing some archeology.

Cheers,

-geoff

[Tom van Dijck]

This mailing list is pretty rarely visitted or responded to, so you may want to move the discussion to github into an issue or something, probably gets you faster response..

That said, there is an msbuild task in the bootstrap process that doesn't require devenv.com and works with just the build tools.

I believe it's: "nmake -f bootstrap.mak MSDEV=vs2017 windows-msbuild"

but it's been a while for me.

Tom.

[Geoff Evans]

Thanks so much for the tip, Tom!