Am 12.05.2021 um 15:20 schrieb jr:

> no one mentioned using/creating a (shell, etc) script to build yet, I think, so
> that'd be my advice.


Just throwing in a couple of $0.02 here:


We are intentionally NOT delivering a single shell script, because...

(1) This is a Unix version of POV-Ray, not specifically a Linux version.

(2) Although there are some well-established standards on Linux machines 
by now, it is never guaranteed that a particular Linux machine uses, 
say, apt for package management.

(3) What we really want is that magic

     sudo apt-get install povray

as the sole installation instructions for POV-Ray. That command, or 
whatever equivalent may happen to work on your Linux distribution. Or 
whatever equivalent mouse click may make that same magic happen. In 
other words, our hope is that package maintainers for the various Linux 
distributions will (continue to) "adopt" POV-Ray and compile it into 
packages custom-tailored to fit the conventions of those very distributions.


The current steps of installing POV-Ray from the GitHub package has the 
following components, which all have their specific place and reason for 
being separate:


(1) Acquire the POV-Ray source code package.

This differs depending on where you want to get your source code package 
from - you could download it via the GitHub web interface, you could 
pull it in via `git` IF you have it installed but we don't know that, 
you could have downloaded it to a USB stick and be carrying it over to a 
machine on which you have no internet access... the possibilities are 
endless. Also, obviously this can't be part of a simple script, because 
you'll have to download that script first.


(2) `prebuild.sh`

This script converts the platform-agnostic source code distribution 
package - the thing you'd download from GitHub - into a Unix-specific 
source code package, populating the directory tree with additional files 
created on the fly that would be a PITA to maintain manually, or move 
Unix-specific files to places where we normally don't want 
platform-specific clutter - all to placate subsequent build steps, which 
use a (and arguably still THE) standard toolchain well established in 
the Unix world.

This script is kept separate because the intention is to eventually not 
have this run by the end user at all, nor even a package maintainer, but 
rather by ourselves, to create a neat official POV-Ray v3.8 for Unix 
source package once that version is finalized, that we can then put up 
for download anywhere we please.


(3) Install any of the necessary prerequisites for you

There is no way to universally do this step for you. We don't know what 
package managers you have installed. Is it apt? Is it rpm? Maybe even 
opkg? nix? pacman? What is the name of the package? It may be different 
depending on your Linux distro. Heck, we don't even know what shell 
you're using. Is it bash? ksh? some other flavor? Nope. Not going there, 
thank you.


(4) `configure`, `make` (or `make check`) and/or `make install`

This sequence of commands is THE leading de-factor standard in the Unix 
world wherever software is still installed from source code (as opposed 
to via package managers), period.

Post a reply to this message