Nearly 4 years ago when I started writing the first lines of OIIO, one of the very first things I did is assemble this side project "external", that would gather and allegedly make it easy to build, all the dependent packages we would need. It was trying to solve two problems: (1) allow you to separately build all the dependencies and store them someplace private (for example, by somebody without root access, or who couldn't or wouldn't run a package installer, or who didn't want to overwrite their system libs); (2) allow all OIIO devs to use exactly the same versions of the dependencies, making development and debugging easy.
Of course, it also created new problems: it's finicky, lots of people have trouble compiling it, and it's extra work for us to maintain. In fact, we really don't maintain it any more at all. I, myself, just use Macports or whatever Linux package manager I have on hand to install the dependencies (or, at work, I must rely exclusively on the pre-installed ones anyway because it's more important to develop on the same libs that I need to deploy on). Almost the only contact I have with "external" is when people complain that they can't get it to work. So, I put it to all of you: * Does anybody still have the need to separately compile the dependencies rather than use your system libs (and package manager)? * Has anybody ever depended on the fact that the "external" packages were locked down and available to all developers? (I know I haven't, as it turned out.) * Is there any point to keeping the external project going at all, or at this point should we just delete it and replace with the list of what packages are needed and where to get them from? Put another way, please speak up if you can think of any reason why we shouldn't just give up and delete the "externals" project. -- Larry Gritz [email protected] _______________________________________________ Oiio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org
