A good development environment setup for Web2Py - eclipse

Have been trying out Web2Py for a couple of days now and I decided it to be a keeper. But there is one thing that concerns me a lot and that might be a showstopper in the end. I need a nice development environment & setup I can trust and be productive with. Coming from the MS Visual Studio world I'm looking for something with good autocomplete / intellisense + functions for versioning and deployment.
I did some attempts to edit my code in Eclipse but it needs additional setup to run with autocomplete, and for debugging I dont know if it's possible. (Noticed there was a Django project template in Eclipse which is a bit tempting I must say.)
Wing Ide has a instruction on how to get web2py up and running and I am up to testing that one. Not free, but very cheap compared to much in the Windows world.
I also want a good versioning (hg) setup, and preferably a semi-automatic FTP-deployment-method.
What IDE do Web2Py developers use, and how do your setup look like?
A complete setup script for a project in a good IDE would be awesome! (Just like the installation is, one click to get it running 100%).
Pycharm looks good, perhaps that one can add web2py support http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/PY-1648
Thanks a lot!

OS: Windows 7/Windows XP
IDE: NetBeans
Version control: TortoiseHg/NetBeans
Debugger: winpdb
Shell: IPython
Publish: WinSCP/PuTTY/TortoiseHg
Scripts
Once I create a new project in web2py I add a few scripts to my main app folder:
web2py\applications\myapp\DebugWinpdb.bat:
C:\Python25\Scripts\winpdb.bat ..\..\web2py.py -i 127.0.0.1 -p8000 -mypassword
web2py\applications\myapp\DebugShell.bat:
C:\Python25\Scripts\winpdb.bat ..\..\web2py.py -S myapp -M
web2py\applications\myapp\Shell.bat:
python ..\..\web2py.py -S myapp -M
IDE
As others have stated you need to do some extra stuff to get autocomplete/intellisense for web2py no matter what IDE you use.
For me NetBeans was a good compromise between does-everything-if-only-you-can-figure-out-how (Eclipse/PyDev) and does-the-basics-but-few-extras (PyScripter).
NetBeans Setup (Project Properties):
Python Category
Python Platform: Python 2.x (default is Jython)
Run Category
Main Module: web2py.py
Application Arguments: -i 127.0.0.1 -p 8000 -a mypassword
NetBeans Pros:
Tight Mercurial integration
Highlights which lines have been added, changed, or deleted in your source file as you edit it
Selective rollback of individual changes you've made since your last commit
One of the nicest visual diff viewers I have used
Python PEP8 style hints (fully customizable)
Name "foo" is not a valid class name according to your code style (CapitalizedWords)
Name "Bar" is not a valid function name according to your code style (lowercase_with_underscores)
Auto-format hotkey (corrects spacing around operators, etc)
Navigation within source file
semantically indexes current source file
organizes alphabetically by type (Class, method, attribute, etc)
makes even enormous style sheets manageable
NetBeans Cons:
Integrated Debugger doesn't work with web2py (that one really hurts)
Long startup time (but acceptably snappy for me once up and running)
Version Control
I use and highly recommend Mercurial for source control. As mentioned earlier, NetBeans has great support for Mercurial but there are some things I'd just rather do in TortoiseHg.
TortoiseHg Pros:
Shell overlay icons
Repository Explorer
view repos history with graphical display of branching/merging
one stop shop for Incoming, Outgoing, Push, Pull, Update, etc with button for Commit tool
Commit tool
Hunk Selection: cherry pick changes from within a file for more focused Commits
Add, Remove, Diff, Revert, Move, Remove, Forget
TortoiseHg Cons:
No easy way to drop directly into a command line
Bug that regularly prevents files from being removed during commit (waits indef for a lock to be released; running hg addremove from command line is a reliable workaround)
Publishing
I use a combination of WinSCP (for browsing), PuTTY (for terminal commands), and TortoiseHg (for push/pull of my repos) to work with my shared hosting account on Webfaction.
The first thing I do is set up public/private key encryption. If you are having trouble getting this set up between Windows and Linux, try these instructions from Andre Molnar. Short story is you need to generate your private key using ssh-keygen on Linux, copy it down to your Windows machine using WinSCP, then convert it for use with WinSCP and PuTTY.
Then add the following lines to your global mercurial.ini file:
[ui]
ssh = "C:\Program Files\TortoiseHg\TortoisePlink.exe" -ssh -2 -i "c:\path\to\your\privatekey.ppk"
Even if you have to connect to multiple servers, you need only copy your public key to each of the different servers. You'll also want to let WinSCP and PuTTY know where your private key is located, but those are fairly easy to figure out.

Try the new web2py admin interface in trunk. It has a web based mercurial interface and a google deploy interface.
In web2py you can edit applications/admin/models/0.py and set
TEXT_EDITOR = 'amy'
And you will get the web based Amy editor with autocompletion. It is not default because because it does not work with some browsers and because autocompletion is not as good as eclipse. It may work for you.
You can use web2py with Eclipse but you need a minor workaround to let Eclipse know about the web2py environment. It is explained here.
I know other users have used other IDEs with web2py, for example WinIDE and pyCharm. I suggest you ask on the web2py mailing list where people are very helpful.

I'm pretty sure that the 'one-click setup script' to do all that you are looking for does not exist (at the moment). But don't be put off - you can achieve a nice development environment to suit your needs and there are lots of choices.
Although I develop on Windows, I like the setup I have as it's more of a 'Unixy' way of thinking whereby I have a number of tools each doing a specific task. Once you get a workflow setup you can be very productive - although I realise it may look a bit confusing initially coming from a Visual Studio world.
Below I outline what I've settled on. I'm sure others will have their own recommendations. Pick the options you like best.
(There should be hyperlinks to useful software below but I don't have enough reputation to include more than 1 link...)
For developing on Windows I'm enjoying using Pyscripter. It's free, fast (compared to Aptana / Eclipse / Netbeans etc) and has some nice features (dark theme, integrated python console and code explorer to name a few).
To get code completion / intellisense to work for web2py you need to add some code to your model / controller files because of the way web2py works. There are some instructions in this discussion topic on the web2py group.
web2py has a great error ticketing system built in (see the web2py book chapter 3). For more comprehensive debugging, pydb seems to be the way to go. Just put the code below as a breakpoint:
import pydb
pydb.debugger()
and it'll take you to the debugger.
I use TortoiseHg for Mercurial integration and it works wonderfully. Combine that with winscp and you can deploy easily.

Caveats: I work in OS X, and do most of my coding in BBEdit.
That said, I've used both Wing and Komodo IDE for web2py debugging, and they've both worked quite well for me. I haven't tried NetBeans in a while now; when I did the Python support seemed a little rough around the edges. And I've never had the time or patience to come up to speed with Eclipse; it's filed in my mental file cabinet with Emacs, no doubt unjustly to Eclipse and/or Emacs.
(And I'll echo mdipierro's recommendation to try the web2py mailing list; it's really indispensable--one of web2py's strongest points.)

Have you considered using fewer tools? Both Python and web2py don't require a whole lot of code to get a lot accomplished. web2py only adds 10 or 15 new function calls (besides the HTML helpers and validators). You might find that Eclipse and other IDEs actually get in the way. Setting up new apps in web2py is simple through the admin system. Since the new app scaffolding copies the welcome app, you can customize new app setup by editing the welcome app. With Mercurial (or Git, Subversion or Bazaar) you can set up a server on your machine or with one of the public sites and either push or pull updates to your production server. Keep it simple, I say.

we are using web2py framework for all our web application needs and this is our setup :
OS - Ubuntu up-to-date
IDE - Aptana Studio 3.0 with pyDev
Version Control - git
Python 2.7
Browser for developing phase : Chrome

I've found the Wing IDE debugger to be very useful. It's a powerful debugger across the board, and also can be configured to do remote debugging, which is really important when you are running web2py on a no-GUI remote machine (e.g. at Amazon Web Services).

Related

Eclipse Auto-Upload on Save, Without Aptana

I'm using Eclipse to develop a website, and I don't want to run Apache, PHP, and MySQL on my local computer. I already have a remote Linux server set up to do that. What I want though, is every time I save a file, Eclipse should upload that file to the Linux server. Dreamweaver does an absolutely perfect job at this task, but I prefer many other features in Eclipse.
I am well aware that there are many, many posts on Stack Overflow about this topic. I have reviewed them, but none seem to quite meet my needs. I'll go through all the possibilities I know about, and talk about why they're not quite right:
Aptana - I specifically excluded this in the question's title. Yes, it does what I'm asking for, but if you install it as an Eclipse plugin, it totally takes over your Eclipse. I only want this one feature, not the whole 800-pound gorilla that changes everything.
Remote System Explorer - I want the primary version to be on my hard drive, not the remote server. This is because I want faster file open, and code completion.
GIT or SVN - When I see other people ask this question on Stack Overflow, someone usually answers "use Git or SVN." Well, I'm already using Git. When I want to sync the entire project, and not just iterate on one file, I will do it using Git. But standalone Git is way too slow if all you want to do is see your changes working. I also don't want to see hundreds of meaningless commits. PTP, mentioned below, is a little better and a little faster, but not fast enough.
PTP - This is an Eclipse plugin that not too many people seem to know about. It has the ability to sync a local folder and a remote folder using Git, and it can do it automatically every time you hit save. This is absolutely awesome, but unfortunately a little slow. When I hit save in Dreamweaver, the change is uploaded to the server in less than one second. The PTP Git operation takes 10 seconds on a tiny project, and I bet that wait gets larger with a larger project. I'm a huge believer in super-fast iteration, and all that PTP waiting will really slow me down.
WebDAV and FTP support for Eclipse - It seems like this is no longer actively developed.
FileSync - Pretty neat, but only supports local filesystem folders.
Are there any other options that I've overlooked? Or are my requirements so specific that there's nothing that fits me right. It seems like there would be other people who want exactly the same thing.
This is my suggestion and it is not quick way to do this, but very customizable.
In eclipse you can set external tools.That means, you can set a php/java script file as external program and send some params that eclipse gives you(${resource_loc} ${project_name} ${resource_path}).
So with script file you can login to SSH or FTP or what ever you want and sync your file or project with remote system.
Just in External Tools Configuration window in eclipse you must set Location to /usr/bin/php
and in Arguments, you can set script path with eclipse variables as script args.
At last you should assign some short key to external program IF Possible.
Did you consider set up Samba server on your Linux and work on you local computer but store project in remote directory served by Samba from Linux or use mentioned FileSync to sync local working directory with network directory (which for Windows look like local and thus FileSync should work).
Or Dropbox?
Edited:
You are constrained heavily I see. Maybe you have on remote host rsync? You could write small utility to manage if your local folder changed (for Windows: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365261(v=vs.85).aspx) and then synchronize folders with rsync via ssh (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-use-rsync-to-sync-local-and-remote-directories-on-a-vps). This would be completely independent from Eclipse.
you can have a try with CodeSync #github (I write it)
or this one
https://github.com/zhwj184/remotedeploy
Now I am in 2021, and most of the above methods cannot work at all.
Finally, I find a small plugin in Eclipse that is very easy to upload the files (may be not auto-load, but is very easy).
Install the "Alibaba Cloud Toolkit" plugin in Eclipse Marketplace;
Using the right-click "deploy" item to deploy the selected files/directory to the remote directory.
There is also a problem. In my eclipse, the inside Terminal is blank (for all terminals including local terminal and SSH terminal), the blank terminal
But the terminal in RSE is ok.
The terminal in RSE
I also tried to uninstall Alibaba Cloud Toolkit, CDT, TM Terminal, etc.
But the inside terminal does not work anymore.
So I use the terminal in RSE now and put its view, as I just want to run my code on the remote server.

Team foundation server on the Mac with Vim

I'm using Vim on a Mac for front-end development and was recently hired at the company that uses Team Foundation Server as their version control system.
I would hate to have to switch to using Visual Studio on Windows because I'm so used to Vim and the Mac.
I found this and was hoping that would be a possible solution. I would still like to avoid editing code in Eclipse. However I wouldn't mind opening Eclipse to do version control stuff.
I'm very unfamiliar with Eclipse and Team Foundation Server (not VCS in general) and I need some advice on how to actually use it.
I'm able to connect to the server and find the project I have to work on, but from here I'm lost. This is the window I'm stuck at.
Anyone who are in a similar situation and could offer some help?
You've done the hard bit I think, firstly you should be able to safely ignore the Work Item and Build "folders" unless someone explicity tells you to use work items, at which point they can show you what you need to know as it works exactly the same as in Visual Studio.
If you double click on the Source Control folder it will open a new window which will show you the source "tree". To be able to Get, Checkout and add source files to the tree you'll need to set up a workspace. Once you've done this then you can get the code and check out.
With Team Explorer Everywhere You also have the option of using the tf command line in the Mac terminal. This would eliminate the need for eclipse. (I'm assuming that as a Vim user you're not afraid to use the terminal)
Another option might be svnBridge however I think you need the server version if you're using a Mac, and this requires a site to be installed in the TFS application server which might not be an option.
Finally TFS now offers support for integration with GIT.

Using Mercurial & Tortoisehg

I am a long time user of Visual Source Safe, TFS or SVN at different times of my career. I want to switch over to Mercurial & TortoideHG.
I have downloaded TortoiseHG version 2.5 from
this page.
To start with I want to transfer a .net solution and the entire structure (folders/files etc) for that solution into the Mercurial Source Code control using TortoiseHG.
Questions
Can any one tell me in simple terms how to transfer the .net solution to source code control?
Do I use the Shell extension command to create a repository or the Tortoise Workbench?
I want to start using and learning the bare basics as I have mostly been using plugins from within Visual Studio.
You can do what you need from the UI.
Start out from Mercurial Webpage.
Also good resources on getting started: Re-educate yourself on version control.

Best option for check-in/out with small team using Visual Studio 2012?

I have a small team of web developers who work together on up to 50 external sites. I am trying to find a better solution to using Dreamweaver's check-in check-out for managing source. We have just started using Visual Studio 2012 here and there and I am curious if TFS is the way to go for us. No one here has ever used versioning or any type of source control before, so I am looking for something similar to what they are used to.
If it matters at all, our sites are all hosted on a Windows 2008 R2 server, and largely written in C#.
I think TFS is a good option to consider. As several people have commented, it will be a jump from what you are your team are used to in Dreamweaver, but I personally feel if you are serious about managing your intellectual property, you will invest in some sort of version control system. With that said, there will be a learning curve regardless whether you are your team select TFS, SVN, Git, etc.
Assuming you do go with TFS, you do get the added benefit of everything else that comes with TFS - it's not just about version control. This includes work item tracking, automated builds/deployments, reports, a simple SharePoint site, etc.
With TFS you get the benefit of all of these features, combined into a single product. You can accomplish a similar setup using open source products as well, but would require you to piece the products together.
I'd use the integrated Subversion client in Dreamweaver, which does the basic stuff very nicely and doesn't require the tedious navigation process that will lead to your team bypassing the system. Only problem, DW does not support the latest versions of SVN so you need to pick up an SVN server that is compatible. Try this:
Setting Up Version Control for Dreamweaver CS6 on Windows
Any previous attempts to get version control working may well have created some .svn folders and files on your PC. You MUST remove ALL of these and UNINSTALL ALL OTHER VARIETIES of Subversion software from your PC before you start.
Go to the VisualSVN Server website and download an archived standard version of their software, version 2.1.16 . Don’t be tempted to grab a later version, because this will install SVN 1.7 or 1.8 and neither will work with Dreamweaver.
http://www.visualsvn.com/server/changes/
Trying to get DW working direct to a local folder using the file:// protocol probably won’t work and is also known to put data at risk. You need the server. I chose to install the VisualSVN server with the default settings, other than opting to use Windows logins and go with HTTP, not HTTPS. I decided to have the repositories live on an internal SSD drive, but any local drive will do. When creating a folder for your repositories to live in, use a name that is pretty general e.g. ourcorepositories . I used lower case for everything.
Right click on ‘Repositories’ to create a new one. Give it a name without any spaces or special characters e.g. mynewprojectrepo and check to ‘Create default structure’ . Before you OK, note the Repository URL and copy it into Notepad or a similar plain text editor so you can refer to it later during 6 below. It will be something like
http://OFFICEDESKTOP/svn/mynewprojectrepo
Notice that the capitalised part of the URL is the name of your computer. Click OK and you now have a repository for your project.
5. Boot DW and go to your project. If you don’t have a project yet, create one and stick some dummy files and folders in it. Go to Site menu>>Manage sites… and 2-click your project. Select Version Control.
6. Set Access to be ‘Subversion’ (no other choices exist), Protocol to be HTTP and for the Server Address enter the name of your computer in lower case e.g.
officedesktop
For the Repository Path enter (e.g., using current example from 4. Above)
/svn/mynewprojectrepo
The Server Port should be 80 . For the Username enter your Windows user name, in lower case. Enter your Windows password for the Password. This is the name and password combo that you use to log in to your PC . Click the Test button and you should get a success message. If not, the best advice is to delete any .svn files and repositories you have created and start again. Be sure not to add any slashes or omit any; the above works. Before you click Save, click the link to the Adobe Subversion resources and bookmark it in your browser. There is a lot of useful background information there. Click Save, click Done.
7. Go to your DW project and open up Local View. All of your site’s files and folders will have a green + sign beside the icon. Right-click on the site folder and click ‘Version control>>Commit” . It is a very good idea to leave comments whenever you change anything, so leave a Commit Message along the lines of “The initial commit for My New Project” and click to Commit. If you have a lot of files to go to the repository, they’ll take some time to upload. As they upload, the green + signs disappear to show that you local version is in synch with the repo.
8. Okay, that’s it, you have Version Control in Dreamweaver CS6. It may also work in CS5 and 5.5. Check out those Adobe resources for some good insights on workflow. I can’t help with any other ways to implement version control, but I can maybe save you time by saying that DW doesn’t integrate with Git and that the basic, but integrated, Subversion client in Dreamweaver is way better than having no version control. For coverage against physical disaster, I’d also add in a scheduled daily backup of your entire repositories folder to some cloud storage.
Apologies for any errors. I’d recheck all of the steps, but A) I think they’ll get you up and running and B) it’s easier to do the install and set up the first time than the second time (all those .svn files and folders to get rid of).

Storing third-party framework/middleware into source control that needs to alter your compiler/IDE

I know there are posts that ask how one stores third-party libraries into source control (such as this and this). While those are great answers, I still can't find the answer to this:
How do you store third-party middleware/frameworks binaries that need to alter your compiler / IDE for the library to work properly? Note: for my needs, I don't need to store the middleware source, I only store header files / lib / JAR ..so that it's ready to be linked.
Typically, you simply link libraries to your app, and you are good. But what about middleware / frameworks that need more?
Specific examples:
Qt moc pre-processor.
ZeroC Ice Slice (ice) compiler (similar to CORBA IDL preprocessor).
Basically these frameworks/middleware need to generate their own code before your application can link to it.
From the point of view of the developer, ideally he wants to just checkout, and everything should be ready to go. But then my IDE/compiler will not be setup properly yet, so the compilation will fail..
What do you think?
Backup everything including the setup of the IDE, operating system, etc. This is what i do
1) Store all 3rd party libraries in source control. I have a branch for all the libraries.
2) Backup the entire tool chain which was used to build. This includes every tool. Each tool is installed into the same directory on each developers computer, so this makes it simple to setup a developers machine remotely.
3) This is the most hardcore, but prepare 1 perfect developer IDE setup which is clean, then make a VMWare / VirtualPC image out of it. This will be useful when you cant seem to get the installers to work in future.
I learned this lesson the painful way because I often have to wade through visual studio 6 code which don't build properly.
I think that a better solution is to make sure that the build is self-contained and downloads all necessary software for itself unless you tell it otherwise. This is the way maven works, and it is really handy. The downside is that it sometimes needs to download a application server or similar, which is highly unpractical, but at least the build succeeds and it becomes the new developers responsibility to improve the build if needed.
This does of course not work great if your software needs attended installs, but I would try to avoid any such dependencies in any case. You can add alternative routes (e.g the ant script compiles the code if eclipse hasn't done it yet). If this is not feasible, an alternative option is to fail with a clear indication of what went wrong (e.g 'CORBA_COMPILER_HOME' not set, please set and try again').
All that said, the most complete solution is of course to ship everything with your app (i.e OS, IDE, the works), but I doubt that that is applicable in the general case, how would you feel about that type of requirements to build a software product? It also limits people who want to adapt your software to new platforms.
What about adding 1 step.
A nant script which is started with a bat file. The developer would only have to execute one .bat file, the bat file could start nant, and the Nant script could be made to do anything you need.
This is actually a pretty subtle question. You're talking about how to manage features of the environment which are necessary in order to allow your build to proceed. In this case it's the top level of your code toolchain, but the problem can be generalised to include the entire toolchain, and even key aspects of the operating system.
In my place of work, we have various requirements of the underlying operating system before our code will successfully run. This includes machine-specific configurations as well as ensuring correct versions of system libraries and language runtimes are present. We've dealt with this by maintaining a standard generic build machine image which contains the toolchain requirements we need. We can push this out to a virgin machine and get a basic environment that contains the complete toolchain and any auxiliary programs.
We then use fsvs to version control any additional configuration, which can be layered on to specific groups of machines as needed.
Finally, we use custom scripts hooked in to our CI server (we use Hudson) to perform any pre-processing steps required for specific projects.
The main advantages for us of this approach is:
We can build and deploy developer and production machines very easily (and have IT handle this side of the problem).
We can easily replace failed machines.
We have a known environment for testing (we install everything to a simulated 'production server' before going live).
We (the software team) version control critical configuration details and any explicit pre-processing steps.
I would outsource the task of building the midleware to a specialized build server and only include the binary output as regular 3rd party dependencies under source control.
If this strategy can be successfully applied depends on whether all developers need to be able to change midleware code and recompile it frequently. But this issue could also be solved via a Continous Integration Server like Teamcity that allows to create private builds.
Your build process would look like the following:
Middleware repo containing middleware code
Build server, building middleware
Push middleware build output to project repository as 3rd party references
Update: This doesn't really answer how to modify the IDE. It's just a sort-of Maven replacement thingy for C++/Python/Java. You shouldn't need to modify the IDE to build stuff, if so, you need a different IDE or a system that generates/modifies IDE files for you. (See CMake for a cross-platform c/c++ project file generator.)
I've written a system (first in Ant/Beanshell at two different places, then rewrote it in Python at my current job) where third-partys are compiled separately (by someone), stored and shared via HTTP.
Somewhat hurried description follows:
Upon start, the build system looks through all modules in repo, executes each module's setup target, which downloads the specific version of a third-party lib or app that the current code revision uses. These are then unzipped, PATH/INCLUDE etc are added to (or, for small libs, copy them to a single directory for the current repo) and then launches Visual Studio with /useenv.
Each module's file check for stuff that it needs, and if it needs installing and licensing, such as Visual Studio, Matlab or Maya, that must be on the local computer. If that's not there, the cmd-file will fail with a nice error message. This way, you can also check that the correct version is in there
So there are a number of directories on the local disk involved. %work% needs to be set using an global environment variable, preferrable on a different disk than system or source-checkout, at least if doing heavy C++.
%work% <- local store for all temp files, unzip, and for each working copy's temp files
%work%/_cache <- downloaded zips (2 gb)
%work%/_local <- local zips (for development or retrieved in other manners while travvelling)
%work%/_unzip <- unzips of files in _cache (10 gb)
%work%&_content <- textures/3d models and other big files (syncronized manually, this is 5 gb today, not suitable for VC either)
%work%/D_trunk/ <- store for working copy checked out to d:/trunk
%work%/E_branches/v2 <- store for working copy checked out to e:/branches/v2
So, if trunk uses Boost 1.37 and branches/v2 uses 1.39, both boost-1.39 and boost-1.37 reside in /_cache/ (as zips) and /_unzip/ (as raw files).
When starting visual studio using bat files from d:/trunk/BuildSystem/Visual Studio.cmd, INCLUDE points to /_unzip/boost-1.37, while if runnig e:/branches/v2/BuildSystem/Visual Studio.cmd, INCLUDE points to /_unzip/boost-1.39.
In the repo, only a small set of bootstrap binaries need to be stored (i.e. wget and 7z).
We currently download about 2 gb of packed data, which is unzipped to 10 gb (pdb files are huge!), so keeping this out of source control is essential. Having this system allows us to keep the repo size small enough to use DVCS such as Mercurial (or Git) instead of SVN, which is very nice. (I'm thinking of using Mercurials bigfiles extension or file sharing instead of a separately http-served directory.)
It work flawlessly. Developers need only to check out, set an enviroment variable for their local cache, then run Visual Studio via a specific batch-file in the repo. No unzipping or compiling or stuff. A new developer can set up his computer in no time. (Installing Visual Studio takes the order of a magnitude more time.)
First time on a new computer takes some time, but then it's fast, only a few seconds. Downloads/unzips are shared on the local computer, do checking out additional branches/versions does not occupy more space. Working offline is also possible, you just need to get the zip files manually if new ones have been uploaded. (This mechanism is essential to test new versions/compilations of third-party libraries.)
The basics are in a repo on bitbucket but it needs more work before it's ready for the public. Apart from doc and polish, I plan to:
extend it to use cmake instead of raw
vcproj-files, to make it more
cross-platform.
script the entire
process from checkout/download of
third-party packages to building and
zipping them (including storing the
download in a local repo) ... currently that's on my dev computer. Not good. Will fix. :)
As for moc, we use Qt's Visual Studio add-in, which stores this in the .vcproj files. Works well. I do think that CMake is one of the best answers for this though