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

[dan miller]

in the case of ODE, the build is quite a complex little beast of its own. 
Are you suggesting that we duplicate the work of these native builds, or is
it more like a meta-build that knows how to get the source, run ./configure,
make install, etc?

-dan

--- Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> wrote:

> 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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