A recent thread[1] on the CMake mailing list got me thinking about OSG and the 3rd party dependency issue on Windows. To solve this problem in VTK, the Kitware team basically compiles libjpeg, libtiff, libpng, libfreetype and more right alongside their source code. They've already CMakeified all of this and the code is publicly available on their CVS[2] repository (see kwpng, kwjpeg, etc.)
It would be very cool to start a folder within OSG's svn for building these different source packages (but outside the OpenSceneGraph project) that could be checked out alongside OpenSceneGraph. CMake could then be configured to build and link against those libraries while on a Windows platform where the libraries aren't available. Obviously this isn't something you would necessarily do for all dependencies but at least for the lightweight ones which are absolutely necessary to having a somewhat functional OSG (jpeg, png, and freetype come to mind). With most developers having multiple cores, I'm pretty sure you could build libraries like libtiff and libjpg relatively quickly. A slower initial build time and need to redistribute a ZIP file alongside the OSG for WIN32 users would be the only cons I can think of. Benefits would be * No need to maintain MSVC 7.1, 8.0, 9.0, MinGW or Cygwin builds of the libraries since they would build themselves * Static builds become easier Furthermore, for libraries that don't "make sense" to build as part of the OSG like the SDL, additional folders could be created to contain prebuilts much as is done right now. Linux and MacOSX users wouldn't be affected by any of this because they likely would never checkout this folder. [1] = http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2009-February/026964.html [2] = http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2009-February/027019.html -- Philip Lowman
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