It would be good to maintain a table on the wiki listing the dependencies and
which version(s) OIIO has been successfully compiled against (also which
platform). Developers can update the table as we go.
________________________________
From: Larry Gritz <[email protected]>
To: OpenImageIO developers <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 8, 2012 10:30 AM
Subject: [Oiio-dev] Whither "external"?
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]
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