[vtkusers] Improving VTK packages: some suggestions. [long]

[Sebastien BARRE]

At 24/11/2000 10:22, Jan Stifter wrote:
>if we discuss about packaging, we could do some work in the compiling
>process too.
>
>- configure/make/rpm/deb are nice tools in a unix/linux environment.
>
>- how about an install tool, which runs on all platforms (win32 too)?
>i know of sebastian barre, that he has looked at some very nice tools,
>which run above perl (correct me if i am wrong) and can generate
>makefiles for all kind of systems, also for win32, borland and m$-vc
>compiler.
>
>so if we discuss about installation, we should also try to remove the
>pcmaker and make a unique way of installing vtk.

I'm not sure it's gonna happen soon :)

pcmaker has several drawbacks (especially regarding too large dependencies 
checking, when  it forces an entire rebuild for some strange reasons or new 
class addition ), but it does its job. As many people, I'm using custom 
based (Perl) scripts to build my own VTK classes and avoid pcmaker, but 
it's a bit too dirty for the moment to be released, and is not Unix oriented.

I've always maintained both automake stuff (for Unix) and VC++ makefile 
(for win32) to build my own project, but it's getting too time consuming, 
especially if you plan to automate stuff like CVS, Perl/Python/Tcl API 
(through swig), documentation (doxygen), regression tests, automatic upload 
to web sites, etc.

So yes, I've been investigating some build tools, and to my surprise I've 
been unable to find *one* satisfying free tool that might work out-of-the 
box right now on both win32 and unix platforms. The most promising is 
called "cons", it's written in perl, and its Python version has also been 
chosen by the "Software Carpentry" site to be part of the future 
build/conf/bug-tracking tools.
http://software-carpentry.com/

There are plenty of build tools, but not much of them are free, still 
actively developped, and have been used at production level. I just had a 
look at tmake, bras, cook, cons. tmake looked OK, but is discontinuated 
now, and after some exercices it also appeared to exhibit some unpleasant 
limitations (for my own purposes). I think 'cons' is much more advanced, 
but it's lacking some win32 support. People are working on that point : 
I've contacted some of them, and they will incorporate their changes to the 
main tree ASAP. But I've seen no Borland C++ support for the moment.

Sure, automake/configure and stuff could work on win32, but to my knowledge 
it still requires Cygwin, and some twicks to force automake to use 
BC++/VC++ instead of gcc. Automake, libtool and stuff are cool (especially 
for these that have been using imake in the past :), but it's time (for me) 
to move to something more practical (thus the Software Carpentry project). 
I guess Kitware does not want to rely on external packages like Perl being 
installed on the system, but there is a free tool, called perl2exe that 
could be used to create a standalone Perl executable (< 900 Ko) if required.