[Bf-committers] keeping it cross platform

[Hans Lambermont]

Michel Selten wrote:

> Okay, I'm ready to take a shot :)

great :)

> First of all I think it's necessary to know what the intended audience
> is for a specific audience. I've come up with three different groups:
> 
> 1) Blender developers (the people who have cvs access).
>    This group of people like to work with the latest stuff and should be
>    able to do so as long as the other two groups don't have to bother
>    with following every latest tiny feature in a (Maybe even obscure)
>    developer tool.

I'm not sure if we want this already. At NaN we occasionally tried the
latest compiler, the latest etc. but general development was always done
with stable/release 'level' tools.

This does not mean that the path to try new stuff out should be closed,
it just talks about the defaults.

I'm also sure a lot of ppl on this list disagree with me here ;-)

> 2) Users who build from source (those who download a source package).
>    This group like to compile an application from source because of two
>    reasons:
>    a) There is no binary package available for their system.
>    b) They want to use the best possible optimizations for their system.
>    This group should need only the basic developer tools necessary to
>    build Blender, but (if possible) not the tools to support the
>    development environment.

I think this is what we should target at. Download and compile on one of
the supported platforms, probably install some extra libs for that
platform, in the platform default way (!) and go.

> 3) Users who install a binary (RedHat, Debian, ... Windows MSI package).

The 'release' following crowd :) The tar.gz stuff, of course. These will
be advertised on the website like before.

> Since my main system is Linux, I only created this table with Linux
> suport in mind. I think that for each OS a seperate table should be
> made. When a tool is used on multiple platforms (think gcc for example),
> the oldest possible version of that tool should be supported for those
> platforms. Example: if gcc 3.1 is common on Linux, but MacOS currently
> only supports 3.0, gcc 3.0 should be used as a minimum on both
> platforms.

agreed. We should follow the -release equivalents of the supported
platforms IMO.

> Okay, those were a lot of issues written down about the tools used by
> Blender. What do you think? (If you have another (hopefully better) way
> of writing down the list of tools and/or categories, just speak up...)

We should first agree on the supported platform list, then which version
of these platforms (-release, -stable, whatever).

I'll make a start, ppl. please complete/fix this list :

    darwin-5.2-powerpc    MacOSX
    freebsd-4.7-i386      FreeBSD
    irix-6.5-mips         IRIX
    linux-glibc2.1.2-i386 Linux
    solaris-2.8-sparc     Solaris
    windows               Windows

Do we still need the glibc thingie on Linux ? If not what would replace
it ? (the kernel version is not interesting).
And what about Linux on alpha, powerpc ? Solaris on intel ?

Hans
-- 
http://lambermont.webhop.org/