I want to set up to build Brave, but my system seems to be more current than what you are asking for.
I have MSVC 2017 Community (which is free) and I run python 3 instead of 2 as the default. I also run cygwin, which apparently isn’t recommended. The latter two can probably be solved by setting paths/scripts strategically and using another shell (power shell?)
My fear is that I’ll wind up in “DLL hell” if I try to backspace to MSVC 2015, and Windows doesn’t make it as easy to insulate a new user I might create from the global environment as Linux does (e.g. hidden registry/path settings, unclear support for multiple versions of the same library)
Can an experienced Brave developer recommend an approach? Something like docker for the dev environment?
OK, some more progress… It turns out my version of MSVC 2017 had expired. Oops! So no big deal there. Plus it looks like the tools install in a separate directory, so good there too, sort of.
Windows privileges cause confusion, on account of the somewhat bizarre choices Microsoft seems to have made. Here’s what I mean:
When you try to install the windows build tools using: npm install --global --production windows-build-tools
…
Unless you are an administrative user, this gets horribly confusing. If you answer the dialog to elevate privileges for the install, it will install the stuff in the home directory of the administrative user, not the current user. The same applies to setting the path: unless you’re an administrative user, you apparently can’t access the advanced settings to set a different path. So when you elevate privileges you are setting the user settings for the administrative user. Then you start a shell and everything seems to have disappeared.
You CAN temporarily make a user administrative, and then it will keep your path after it is a regular user again. It’s a pain, because you have to switch users and then log out from the one whose privileges have changed.
As a Linux user, I find this behavior bizarre, but there you are.