[opensource-dev] Viewer Tools Upgrades - with a call for help

[Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)]

As some of you are certainly aware, the Linden viewer devs have been 
busy for the last several weeks updating our tools for building viewers. 
The tools changes include:

  * Windows building with Visual Studio 2013
  * Mac building on OSX 10.10 with Xcode 6.1
  * Linux building with gcc 4.6
  * All platforms using Autobuild 1.0
    <https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Oz_Linden/Autobuild_Improvements>

The canonical repository for this is 
https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-tools-update , and the various 
packages each have a lindenlab/3p-update-/name/ repository (those will 
be pulled to the 3p-/name/ repos when the viewer that uses them is 
promoted to viewer-release).

We hope/expect to have the Mac and Windows versions moving through the 
usual viewer release pipeline in early January: the Mac builds and runs 
now, Windows is very close.

Note that Microsoft now provides for free use of VS2013 Pro for 
non-commercial use, so it should be possible to greatly reduce the 
differences between the configurations we use for the Linden viewers and 
those for open source devs (possibly even eliminating all the 
differences other than the use of proprietary packages); contributions 
to this end are solicited.

Which brings me to Linux... we could use your help with getting it up to 
the new framework and getting it working again. Most of the packages 
have been rebuilt (though some may need additional work). We don't plan 
to delay the release of the Windows or Mac in order to wait for Linux. 
It's not easy to justify our spending a lot of our developers time on 
Linux, though *I very much want to keep an actively maintained Linux 
viewer going.* Linux use of the official viewer is a microscopic and 
shrinking percentage of Second Life usage. I could really use some help 
from the open source community to make sure that the Linux viewer 
remains current. If you care about having a Linux version available, 
please help make it so. Today was my last official work day until 
January 5th - it would be fantastic New Years if there were a bunch of 
contributions waiting for me then (I'll be keeping an occasional eye on 
email through the holidays, but probably not actually doing any merging 
and building).

If you, like me, celebrate the turn of year in some way with those who 
are important to you, I hope it is restful, peaceful, refreshing, and 
full of love and good thoughts. See you next year.

PS. Initially, I'd like us to focus on getting the current functionality 
working. Contributions that are focused on getting us to the next 
bleeding edge gcc version (pick whichever you like) of some tool are 
interesting and welcome, as are offers to help with a 64 bit build - but 
I want to get the current attempt to build with gcc 4.6 and autobuild 
1.0 working /first/, so those contributions will wait until that much is 
done.


-- 
*Scott Lawrence* | /Engineering Director, Second Life/
Email or Hangouts oz at lindenlab.com <mailto:oz at lindenlab.com> | Second 
Life Oz Linden <https://my.secondlife.com/oz.linden>
Linden Lab| Makers of Shared Creative Spaces <http://lindenlab.com/>
Check out what we're working on! <http://lindenlab.com/products>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/attachments/20141223/b5f93f04/attachment.htm