[Bf-committers] Manic MSVC blender compile session

[Laurence Bourn]

Hello I had a MSVC massive blender compile session last night, and wow was
it difficult to resurect this particular leviathan. To be honest I still
needed a bit of help from some libraries lying around on my machine from NaN
dayz.

It would be nice to work together on this and come up with some tasks that
should be done to get blender compiling on all plaftforms. Here are the
things I found difficult on windows,...

a) No extern directory yet for outside libs.
   * I suggest we use a top level extern/platform/ folder with lib and
include sub directories matching the top level intern directories. External
libraries that I needed were:
    * zlib, png, openssl, fmod, openal, python
    We should put detailed descriptions in each folder indicating where to
get the libs and sources for all platforms and where to put them. 

b) dead directories and redundent cod. 
  Intern contains dead or obsolete code. It is very difficult to work out
exactly what blender needs so lets move the unused code out of there into an
intern/attic directory or something.  

c)Physics and sound APIs do not encapsulate external lib dependencies.
Please can we move all the physics stuff into a seperate library (preferably
intern) and make the library properly wrap the individual implementations.
This library should not expose anything of the individual implementations
outside the library. 

d) The same goes for the sound API it agains seems rather messy. Why are
there 2 choices openal and fmod? Stick in a seperate independent library
with nice API. Then write blender code to use that abstract API

e) Python freeze, seems no way to perform a python freeze or get access to a
libfrozen.a for windows using MSVC. Does anybody know how to do this?

Most of the simple c stuff compiled and linked without to many problems. 

The last minor thing is that the .ico (icon files) for blender use an
obsolete format no longer supported by MSVC.

Anyway the final beast produced by this process seemed very unstable (still
no button text on windoze builds) the thing crashed when I tried to do a
boolean op (err new booleans:-) which they never did before.

So what to do...

a) Stop trying to add functionality at this stage (physics) 
b) sort out and define the directory structure
c) detail how to get external libraries for all plats.
d) Sort out the fsking Makefiles and project files.
e) Get a cross platform build tool working.

The project has rotted considerably (as to be expected) since NaN and I
think a little discipline now would be a good thing. Sart cracking the whip
Ton :-)

Cheers Loza.