bison.exe cannot find file m4sugar.m4 which is required by an MSBuild in VS2010

Question

I am trying to compile QGIS in Visual Studio. I used OSGeo4W to download the packages, added Flex.exe and Bison.exe to my environment path. Downloaded QGIS Release 2.0, and launched a CMake-GUI with the option "Visual Studio 10". Then I configured my paths using the GUI tool.

Then I hit configure and generate, and it worked. I looked in my directory and there were Visual Studio Solution files available for me. Then I hit "Build All" and I got the following output in the "Output Window"

Generating flex_qgsexpressionlexer.cpp
Generating qgsexpressionparser.cpp 1>  C:\OSGeo4W\bin\bison.exe: cannot open file
`C:\OSGeo4W/share/bison/m4sugar/m4sugar.m4': No such file or directory

So this is where I am stuck. The first thing I tried was to download m4sugar.m4, which I found here -- I didn't really think it would work since I downloaded it from apple.com, but I thought it was worth a shot, I put it in the correct directory, and hit build... This time it displayed
Generating qgsexpressionparser.cpp but it just stalled there and wasn't able to give anymore output.

After doing some reading I got the impression that m4sugar.m4 is somehow not a standard file and that you need to use it while running msys or cygwin. So then I tried to do my Visual Studio Build with MSys but I was unable to run vcvars32.bat. Maybe I should try harder with that approach? Anyway to get this m4 file working?

Answer 1

Ok, so I was lazy.

I wanted to save time so i just copied the bison.exe to my c:\osgeo4w\bin with was already set in my %PATH%. And it requires all these other files. So I changed the path in my CMake-GUI to point to the actual Bison.exe with access to the appropriate relative paths, and I made sure that it wasn't in a directory with spaces, and then reconfigured my CMake-GUI and regenerated my project, and its working now.