[sldev] Webkit versus Second Life

[Opensource Obscure]

On Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:14:28 -0500, Soft <soft at lindenlab.com> wrote:

> We're pretty far away from that. We rely on a handful of libraries
> that we can't provide on our own. We need some extra development tools
> installed. We have library and artwork bundles apart from the source
> bundle. We have separate steps for configuring and for building. An
> awful lot of new devs get lost somewhere in the process.
> 
> Of all the above, if we were going to focus on knocking out just one
> step next, which do you think would be most valuable? Which is the
> highest hurdle?

Personally, preparing your system to build the viewer. 
That is, not only installing all libraries and dev tools, but also
checking their versions, and sometimes having to install a specific 
version - one that could then easily conflict with the one present 
by default on my system.

I'm fine with getting all the bundles and using the develop.py script.
I can also live with the fact that the resulting .bz2 file is created 
in a deep-level directory - it's not a big deal (its location is 
printed in the last lines of the building process output).
I don't see any other big hurdle.

Understanding that to avoid a certain build error I need to use
a specific version of a software (different than the one provided
by my system by defult) was someway harder and more problematic.
This problem is even harder when docs are not complete and 
out-of-date. I'm fine with following long and detailed step-by-step
instructions - but again, I get that it's hard to write this kind 
of instructions when we have to deal with many different distros
(talking about Linux here, as it's the only environment I use).

Once again, please note that I'm probably less competent than
most people on this list: I'm not a developer and I never wrote
a patch - I just download the sources and try to build them, 
1) because I'm curious about future viewer features,
2) to help spotting and reporting bugs,
3) to apply existing patches that haven't already been fixed in 
the official branches.

HTH,
Opensource Obscure

p.s.
I could build from trunk and there are shadows all over SL now!
w00t!