[Symphony] troubling building 5.3.5/5.4.0 with msvc v9

[S R]

Hi,

My goal is to build a custom application.  I did this several versions
ago but at that time, I had trouble with adding user cuts.  I saw some
notes in the change log that made me think something may have been
changed/corrected.  So I decided to use the latest release.  I
downloaded the source from subversion.

1. Using the MSVisualStudio v9 solution, the libOsiClp project fails
to load.  It seems that this project has moved within the externals
tree structure.  I changed this path and was able to load the project.

At a quick glance, it seems that this issue may affect many
projects/solutions and other versions besides 5.3.5/5.4.0.


2. Trying to build the user.sln from the v9 application directory, I
get an error

 Cannot open include file: 'OsiSolverInterface.hpp': No such file or directory

After adding/changing several of the include paths, I was able to get
it to build.  Possibly related, it seems that there are insufficient
levels of "..\" directory nesting for almost all the include paths.
However, some of this may be something about my setup, but it seems
unlikely since I haven't changed anything from the svn directory
structure.

(Also, the debug and release include directories are qualitatively the
same but differ in order.)

Again, at a quick glance, it seems like affects other projects and versions.


3. There is a fair amount of conflicting information about versions,
releases and documentation.  On the symphony project page, I see "The
current stable version ... is 5.3 and the current release is 5.3.4."
 And "the latest stable version of SYMPHONY is 5.4".   And I see that
"5.3.5 has been released".  The "Quick start" references "5.3.4".  The
snapshot references "5.3.4".  The binaries seem to stop at 5.2.  Also
the documentation seems to be for 5.3.4.  Testing status references
5.2.0.


4. Building a user application, I get errors 'fatal error C1189:
#error :  "don't have header file for math"' when building lbCgl and
libClp.  Adding a preprocessor directive corrected it, but was I
supposed to configure this somewhere?


5. The functions user_find_cuts and cg_add_explicit_cut (and others?)
in the documentation do not match the signatures in the source code.
Maybe this is related to the other documentation issues, but I don't
think so.  Looking at the tex files in the 5.4.0 release tree, things
still seem out of sync.


6. There were multiple errors in ClpCholeskyWssmp,
ClpCholeskyWssmpKKT.  To progress, I removed the files from the libClp
project even though (*I think*) I have COIN_HAS_WSMP undefined.
However, at this point, I admit I have grown weary of this and didn't
do a good job of tracking down the root problem.


7. Seems like functions from OsiSymSolverInterface.cpp are unresolved
unless these files are included in the user project.  I didn't see an
associated project.  But maybe that is what I should do if I am trying
to use this interface-- I couldn't find anything in the documentation.



Have I missed something in the install/setup/configuration?  I quickly
admit that in trying "fix" some of this, I may have caused most of
these later problems myself...

Thanks,
Sam