[Bf-committers] Development Environments

[Chad Fraleigh]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 4:07 AM, Antony Riakiotakis <kalast at gmail.com> wrote:
> We face the same issues for all platforms. Recently I tried to build
> blender with MinGW gcc 4.7 and it failed due to incompatibility
> between 4.6 and 4.7 ABIs on libraries (thankfully all our libraries
> still work with 4.6). We should add a notice of these issues on our
> build pages too so interested builders don't find themselves wondering
> why their builds crash on startup/fail to link. It must have been the
> same for linux distros with our old linux lib folders, thankfully gone
> now :)

This makes me wonder if it would be worth blender having standard
build environment VM images (for VirtualBox and maybe VMWare).
Basically a very minimalistic OS install (for a small image size) with
all the external tools and libraries needed to compile blender already
there, and a default user account. That way developers don't each have
to go through all the same headaches, nor muck with what might be
their own workstation environments.. just d/l the image, create a
machine instance, boot and mount the source (or svn checkout it on a
secondary virtual drive).

One image could be done for each of:

 * Linux 32-bit
 * Linux 64-bit
 * FreeBSD 32-bit
 * FreeBSD 64-bit

The Linux versions would also contain mingw cross-compile resources
needed to build the Windows binaries since native Windows OS images
couldn't be distributed due to licensing. This would only leave Mac
developers with the environment setup problems (unless there is a
working cross-compiler for that too???).


-Chad