[Opensim-dev] 3rd party libs and build system revisited

[Sean Dague]

One of the things that has always been a blessing and a curse in the
current opensim svn tree is all the dll files included in bin/.  For
things that are pure C#, these are aren't such a big deal, and make all
our lives better.  However, for things that have native libraries, this
leads to pain.

Like today, when a libsl update was done as part of the inventory grid
enablement.  It did not go smoothly.

Right now we've got at minimum 5 architectures we need to build .so for:
MS 32 & 64bit, Linux 32 & 64 bit (intel), Mac.  I also noticed someone
on IRC yesterday trying out Linux on sparc, and I'll be looking into
Linux on PPC in a couple of months.

libsecondlife exists in subversion, which means that it would be
possible to define an svn external
(http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s04.html) and build
libsecondlife as source with the current OpenSim tree (the same approach
could probably be used for ode).

However, in order to do this, we'd need to do significantly more with
our build system.  Which means I think we need to revisit the current
approach on the build system.  Right now there is the meta build system
of Prebuild that generates very basic build files for msbuild and nant.
Doing something as complicated as native code through this kind of
system only leads to madness, and something I don't think we should go
anywhere near.

If we were to consider a pure nant based solution here (as nant is cross
platform) we could actually integrate all of this (and as I'm suggesting
this approach, would take on the responsibility of making this work).
It would also open up the ability to do prechecks prior to build (look
for old mono, missing libraries, etc), and integration of nunit tests.

I know this degrades some of the experience of MS VS developers.  Not
being one, I'm not sure how to quantify losses on that front vs. gains
on solving a lot of these other issues we're getting on a regular basis
on IRC.  Hopefully others can comment there.

This is a proposal for group discussion.  Please fire back with
comments and/or counter proposals.

    -Sean

-- 
__________________________________________________________________

Sean Dague                                       Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net                            Linux Users Group
http://dague.net                                 http://mhvlug.org

There is no silver bullet.  Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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