[ros-dev] Removing the autoregister feature from rbuild

[Eric Kohl]

Hi!

I want to remove the "autoregister" feature from rbuild. Let me explain 
why I want to do this.

The "autoregister" feature in rbuild is used to automatically add dlls 
to the syssetup.inf file which require an ole server registration. The 
ole servers in these dlls will then be registered in the 2nd setup stage.

The gain of adding the ole server dlls to syssetup.inf automatically is 
almost non existant as a developer needs to add an 'autoregister' 
element to the rbuild file of the dll.
For example:
     <autoregister infsection="OleControlDlls" type="DllInstall" />
The corresponding line in the 'OleControlsDll' section of syssetup.inf is:
     11,,comctl32.dll,2

Please remember that the line above only needs to be added once.

Now, what do we loose by generating syssetup.inf automatically? Right 
now it is only the comments in this file as it is parsed and serialized 
by the inflib library.

OTOH, my future plans for syssetup.inf are severely hampered by the way 
rbuild handles syssetup.inf because rbuild is not able to create or 
modify a Unicode version of syssetup.inf. But, a Unicode version of 
syssetup.inf is required in order to replace the hard-coded creation of 
the start menu and desktop links in syssetup.dll by a configurable, 
localizable and Windows compatible inf-based method.

And finally since Timo suggested to replace rbuild by cmake: The 
autoregister feature would surely be one of the victims of this change.
So why not drop this almost useless feature now?

What do you think?


Regards,
Eric