flac dev - Mar 2013 - Updated MSVC patch

> Are the changes for FLAC/ordinals.h really necessary? Yhe FLAC/*.h
> header files specify libFLAC's public API. In a previous thread on
> this mailing list back in February we decided that for compilers
> that didn't supply <stdint.h> the developer should supply
something
> suitable. Here's the commit:
Yes, they are necessary.  Here is the rationale

1) FLAC/ordinals.h is a public header file, so replacing this file with an
MSVC-compatible version is not only the responsibility of a developer
building libFLAC, but also a developer using libFLAC.

2) Mistakes made by a developer supplying a custom implementation of
FLAC/ordinals.h and trying to link against a pre-built libFLAC.dll can
lead to ABI incompatibility.

3) I understand requiring developers to provide an implementation for
lesser-used niche compilers and development environments, such as embedded
systems, but Visual Studio 2008 and prior represent a huge portion of
developers.

-Ben Allison

Ben Allison wrote:
> Yes, they are necessary.  Here is the rationale
> 
> 1) FLAC/ordinals.h is a public header file, so replacing this file with an
> MSVC-compatible version is not only the responsibility of a developer
> building libFLAC, but also a developer using libFLAC.
I was aware of that. 
 
> 2) Mistakes made by a developer supplying a custom implementation of
> FLAC/ordinals.h
The comments in that file specifically pointed to two known good
BSD licensed stdint.h implementations. 
> and trying to link against a pre-built libFLAC.dll can
> lead to ABI incompatibility.
That can happen any time people use a prebuilt binary produced
by a different compiler.
> but Visual Studio 2008 and prior represent a huge portion of
> developers.
I find it difficult to believe that developers sophisticated enough to
actually use the FLAC API, are not smart enough to read the comments 
above the <stdint.h> include and grab one of the linked implementations.

Anyway, regardless of all that, I have relented and included an
MSVC < 2010 section in that file with the logic switched around a bit
and some comments.

I would like to know how many years I have to wait before we can ditch
this stuff.

I intend to do some testing on platforms I have available today and
roll a second pre-release after my testing.

Erik
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/

On 09-03-13 01:01, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> I would like to know how many years I have to wait before we can ditch 
> this stuff. I intend to do some testing on platforms I have available 
> today and roll a second pre-release after my testing.
Talking about ditching, there are still .dsp files in the repository, 
these are MSVC 6 files. I haven't seen anyone on the list testing the 
source with that version (MSVC 2005 was the first version to have a free 
express version so this one hasn't) so these are probably broken as well.

MSVC 6 was released in 1998 and was succeeded by MSVC .NET in 2002, so 
maybe these files (all.dsp, all_static.dsp, all_dynamic.dsp and flac.dsw 
if I'm correct) should be removed from the repository? Someone spotting 
them might think MSVC 6 is still supported.