[vtkusers] Lack of Build Support for OS X

[Mike Jackson]

      I would like to take issue with Kitware's apparent lack of  
caring for the OS X platform. I attended a Paraview training not too  
long ago where I asked why the Mac wasn't a first class citizen when  
it cam to supported platforms (running in X is fine. I realize it is  
the quickest way to get to OS X, BUT the lack of compile support is  
just astounding) and I got all the "classic" reasons why Kitware  
might not be supporting OS X as good as on other platforms: Too Slow,  
Not enough Market share, blah blah blah. The slowness part is kinda  
amazing to me since there are some seemingly "Fast" machines  
available to run OS X. When I brought that up, the response was that  
all Kitware Employees want to run laptops and since the Apple latops  
are not running G5's it would be hard to support OS X.
     Then the whole market share argument came up. Of course there  
was 12 people in the class and 5 or 6 of us had Macs.. Doesn't that  
just scream that OS X has a larger share of the audience that Kitware  
serves than you _think_ it does?
    Where I work there are lots of us with Macs that want to use VTK.  
We like to combine the power of VTK with the rapid application  
development cycle of Cocoa. Generally is takes us less than a day to  
whip something up to Visualize our data. When it takes a week of  
chasing weird linker errors it becomes a lot more frustrating.
    Also, the speed of the compile was also cited. Yes, GCC is slow.  
That is something that we just realize on OS X. But I should only  
have to compile VTK _once_, and if it takes 2 hours to compile it,  
then fine. OpenSceneGraph takes over 2 hours to compile on my  
machine. I have only had to do it ONCE. It has worked flawlessly  
since the initial compile.

---
Mike Jackson
mike _at_ bluequartz dot net