[Bf-committers] make.bat make.exe name collision/confusion

[Ray Molenkamp]

Make.bat was called that long before I started maintaining it, so I have no
historic knowledge on how that came to be.

The 'Using the Command line' section already explains how to open a proper
cmd.exe command prompt. The wiki instructions work well *IF* you follow them
to the letter, over the years I have helped out many many people building
blender, and the most common mistake is people not reading or deciding "I can
skip this bit, it doesn't look important" and there's no amount of
documentation that'll work to fix that behavior.

If we're gonna rename it, I'd probably prefer Build.cmd over make_vs.bat but
honestly given we do not support mingw or cygwin builds, we might as well
just check for windows in the GNUmakefile and error out if we figure out it
is running on windows.

--Ray



On 9/2/2017 2:10 PM, Nicholas Rishel wrote:
> The current Building Blender on Windows
> <https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Building_Blender/Windows> wiki
> page recommends using the convenience batch file "make" to build Blender.
> When running make from Git Bash (and I suspect other versions of bash for
> Windows) the commands as presented will default to make.exe if it's in the
> PATH and appear to run as expected. This is likely to cause confusion for
> new developers reviewing this document.
>
> The problem above is probably best solved in the wiki with a quick edit;
> the reason I'm mailing here is to see if there is a particular reason the
> file uses the name "make" other than it's similarity in function to
> makefiles. I suspect it's a convenience for other scripts which usually
> rely on make but no particular reason is given in the git logs.
>
> If there isn't a strong reason to keep the name as is it would reduce
> confusion if make.bat were renamed to make_vs.bat or similar so that bash
> on Windows doesn't appear to be running it while actually running bash.exe.
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