Hi all, hi Cedric,
In my opinion the main issue is windows, I tried to build an
openscenegraph environment on windows, and it's not as
easy. The dependencies are to be rebuild if not up to date (i get visual
express edition 9 and not binary are available),
so i get the work from mike on the svn but not works out of the box.
More work are needed to make it work out of the box.
And i suppose that most of people do it, and this work is not shared and
commited somewhere.
I agree, the biggest challenge for Windows is the number of different
toolsets available. What we call the "build matrix" is just too large to
be doable. There's MSVC7.1, MSVC8, MSVC9, cygwin, mingw. Then there's
debug, release, relWithDebugInfo, ... Then there's static, dynamic,
dynamic but with statically linked dependencies...
On Linux, what's the strategy? Do we aim to offer binaries for all
distros, some distros, the most popular, those which are used by the
packagers? I think our strategy for distros on Linux could be transposed
to be our strategy for toolsets on Windows.
As you've said, in the past only the dependencies and binaries for VC8
SP1 were available. That was the most popular, and that was what Mike
had / was willing to take the time out of his schedule to provide.
That touches on the issue of volunteering time. As you said, people
surely have built the VC7.1 and VC9 dependencies, but they just haven't
put them up somewhere public. If that's the case, in all this time since
2.4 (when we had the last refresh of Mike's dependencies package), then
I wonder if we'll be able to find someone willing to volunteer the time
to do it officially.
On my side, I've had to compile the basic dependencies for VC7.1, VC8
and VC9, but they're all compiled as static libs, which is different
from Mike's binaries package (it's our internal policy for releases). I
don't have time, in addition to my normal work, to become "dependencies
maintainer", much less "windows binaries maintainer" at large. Managing
when to bump the version of a given dependency, how to build it so it
works for everyone, ... I just don't think I'd be able to do it in a
timely manner, so I prefer waiting for someone else to volunteer.
That's one place where the Linux package management systems are a real
boon, they totally remove this issue - you can just build an OSG package
that depends on a given version of libjpeg-dev, freetype-dev, etc. and
you're done, the package system will pull down the right version of the
dependency automatically. I really wish there was something like that on
Windows, at least for open source applications/libraries. That and a
system-default place to install libraries like on Linux too...
I digress... If someone were to step up and find a way to automate some
of that process (building dependencies for different toolsets, packaging
them, and then building OSG itself against those for the same toolsets),
I might be willing to help, which in that case would come down to
donating machine time. I'm also willing to help testing, that's a given.
Sorry to be pessimistic, but I find that stuff is a real time sink, and
IMHO people will end up building themselves (either to get a fix from
SVN, or whatever), so I don't see that much of a benefit.
Then there's the issue of installers. I'm not sure an installer is the
best way to package OSG for Windows. OSG itself is not an application,
it's a set of developer libraries and example programs. I think making
an installer would make people think that the examples can be run with a
double-click, which in most cases is not true (most of the examples
require command line arguments to run).
I think a zip containing binaries and headers (what's needed to build a
project linking to OSG) would be good enough. Sure, some libraries use
installers (Wx, Qt come to mind) but I think it adds extra complexity
and goes into parts of the system (the registry) which are not
necessary. Plus, since there's no easy way to update software that's
installed with installers (unistall + reinstall is the norm), just
unzipping the new version is quicker and less error-prone.
Anyways, that's my 2 cents.
J-S
--
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.cm-labs.com/
http://whitestar02.webhop.org/
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