[ODE] documentation initiative

[Billy Zelsnack]

This is the kind of attitude that made open-source completely worthless
on
the windows platform up until a couple of years ago.

There is no reason why you can't have many happy build systems. Miles
is
right. Each platform should have a separate maintainer. Someone that
actually gives a shit about their platform.

Under vc6/vc7 you should be able to just double click on the project
and
have it magically build.

Under linux you can use whatever the latest fashion in building is.

Under elite-linux it could be so complicated and obscure to build that
it
takes 3 days just to figure out how to build the tools required to
build
ode.

The point is, just throw each platform build in its own directory and
make a
rule that they can't interfere with any other builds.

About a month ago I spent several hours getting the vc6 build to work.
The
problem ended up being the paths being screwed up and it grabbing
includes
or libs or something from one of the 98 previous other versions of ode
i
have on my machine. I have been using vc6 for at least 5 years or
whatever
now and it still took me awhile to figure it out. It would of taken
forever
for a newer user.

---------------
Luke Palmer wrote:
>Have you ever done any cross-platform development?  Yeah, everyone is
>using windows, but a whole different everyone is using linux, OSX,
etc.
>And you have no idea how difficult it is (many times impossible) to
make
>something cross-platform without a pre-build step.

>It didn't take us much to build on windows, all you have to do is read
>the Wiki, download GNU make (they point you right to it, and there's
no
>"install", just a copy), run a batch file, and type "make".  Simple
>stuff for any programmer.  It'd certainly be nice if the main page
would
>point more directly to that document, however.

>And it was very nice for our cross-platform game that ODE was friendly
>for the other operating systems.  It uses a Makefile, so we can
include
>it right in our tree and hack the internals to our heart's content,
and
>it builds nicely right along with the rest of our project.

>But I was disappointed that there was no pre-build library and header
>set for the releases.  This should be something to look into, but
don't
>expect it to be maintained in CVS.  That's a pain in the ass for
people
>not working on windows, which a lot of developers (contrary to your
>claims) do.  Just the releases should be fine.


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