On 9/22/2015 11:09 AM, clipka wrote:
> A quick note though: According to tradition we would probably have named
> the directory "vs14", after Visual Studio's internal version number.

IMO, whatever makes things easier.

If we get to the point where my work is being committed to the original 
branch, and you ask me to rename the directory, I'll rename it. But 
given that I always have to look up which version number goes with which 
version of VS, I'll leave it as it is for now.

>> However, is there any reason they aren't simply excluded
>> from the source, with a note that they are dependencies?
>
> Yes, there is absolutely a reason. Two actually:
>
> The first reason is historic. Before the advent of the World Wide Web,
> and even during its early days, getting hold of 3rd party libraries used
> to be quite a challenge (except on Unix systems, where package
> management has a long tradition, whereas in the DOS and Windows world it
> is still unheard of to this day); so to allow non-Unix users to build
> their own version easily, the POV-Ray source code packages for those
> systems have traditionally always come with source code for all the 3rd
> party libraries POV-Ray could make use of.

Given that package managers are pretty much ubiquitous in software 
development (even Visual Studio has Nuget, which has served me quite 
well in my {admittedly limited} needs), it may be time to rethink this.

However, my first goal is simply to get POV to compile using the new 
tools, so that's a goal for another day.

> Case in point, the official OpenEXR build process turned out to be so
> notoriously difficult to get right, that for quite a while during the
> development of POV-Ray 3.7, OpenEXR support was disabled by default in
> the official POV-Ray source package for Windows, and even some
> developers chose to not bother trying to enable OpenEXR support in their
> development builds.
>
> Boost, too, has been difficult to build properly. It may be no
> coincidence that to this date the boost thread and system libraries keep
> causing trouble even in POV-Ray's Unix build process.

Yes, I've already noticed this from working with them yesterday.

I'll roll back to the versions included with the POV source, and just 
work on getting the project files set up correctly. It may be necessary 
for me to install VS2010 so I can compare, but I'll try to do it by 
reading the original vcxproj files instead.

Post a reply to this message