Exiv2

The Visual Studio support for v0.26 is too ambitious for the time available. Adding CMake/Visual Studio support to v0.26 has been a very considerable undertaking. Additionally CMake/Visual Studio is being used by the build server. So, I'm deferring most of this to v1.0 and some of this will be implemented in v0.27.

v0.25 introduced a new script 'configure.bat' which calls configure.py. This enables the user to configure the Visual Studio build system to optionally select different libraries to be included in the build. Currently, when a library is selected, the code must be present in the prescribed directory relative to <exiv2dir>. This should be extended to enable the use of pre-build binary libraries. This will have a hugely beneficial impact on build times. When building support libraries from source, the increase in build time for expat and zlib are about 20-30 seconds each. However, openssl/libssh/curl adds about 20-30 minutes to the build. Storing precompiled copies of built libraries on build server will have a huge performance gain on the build server.

The use of the clang compiler from within Visual Studio (as an alternative to the Microsoft cl compiler) should be investigated and supported if possible.

The build server runs the test suite from jenkins_build.sh. I will investigate modifying the Visual Studio solution/project files to enable tests to be run from Visual Studio itself. To actually use those tests will require cygwin to be installed on the user's computer. When cygwin is not available, the user will be instructed to install cygwin. I had a prototype of this running some time ago and this is quite easy.

When we add the groups of tests, the number of sub-projects in Visual Studio will be more than 50. A hierarchy of projects should be established. These would include "support" (zlib, expat etc) "core" (xmpsdk, src/*.cpp, exiv2, exifprint etc), "test apps" (iotest etc), "sample apps" (exiv2json etc), and "testing" (tests, teste etc).