[sldev] Better build instructions

Soft soft at lindenlab.com
Fri Jul 25 10:56:08 PDT 2008


A complete guide for cmake that's inclusive of all library copies and
system setup steps does not yet exist. 1.21/ will branch from release/
shortly, so it's just about time.

We can use the existing cmake page as a base, but this time around I'd
really like to avoid two things. I think these are to blame for the
current confusing instructions:

1) Avoid having separate pages for every platform and compiler
combination. cmake unifies many of the build and configuration steps.
Most things developers care about can be explained conceptually. "Open
the project in your cmake target directory and select the debug build"
can replace specific references to XCode, KDevelop, Visual Studio,
etc. on separate pages. "Be sure python 2.5 is installed" - if we
really need to delve into where to find it, we can do better than a
page per platform. A single python page makes more sense than five
different rewordings of the same concept buried in five different
pages.

2) Stop reusing the same wiki page for every viewer version. Build
steps will continue to change in the future. I would rather we copy
and archive build instructions for prior versions. Right now, we have
instructions peppered all throughout the documentation saying "If your
tree is newer than 1.18.5..." or "Before 1.20..." I would rather we
have a release build page, then fork that and label it with the
applicable versions when build steps will change substantially.

Are these two things agreeable? What else can we do to avoid these
things ballooning unmanageably?


On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Dante Tucker <danteferret at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it possible for someone to post a link to complete instructions on
> building the current CMake viewer? Or do these not exist yet?
>
> I had absolutely no problem building the viewer under the previous system.
> However now that it has changed I am not sure where to even start.
>
> A complete start to finish guide would be nice.
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 5:13 AM, Boroondas Gupte
> <sllists at boroon.dasgupta.ch> wrote:
>>
>> http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/CMake
>> I don't know if this will help with dependency hell, but at least the
>> barriers between different IDEs should become lower. It won't fix/work
>> around compiler incompatibilities, that has to be done by either writing
>> portable code or #ifdef compiler macros. As far as I can tell, secondlife is
>> already quite good at that. (It can be compiled and run on at least tree
>> completely different platforms!)
>>
>> As the current head of the "release" branch already uses CMake, all
>> documentation not reflecting this is definitely out of date, when applied to
>> the code checked out from there. I think Soft once said that if you haven't
>> already, there isn't much sense in still learning the old (pre-CMake) build
>> system. Better to wait until the new way is documented enough for new coders
>> (or non-coders) to be followed.
>>
>> cheers
>> Boroondas
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