For Windows builds with Visual Studio (or at least the VC++ compiler), it may be an useful alternative to have the user install the externals that are available via NuGet. See <http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2015/02/13/find-your-favorite-library-for-c-in-nuget.aspx>.
I don't know what is on your list. It would be interesting to check what is available. With regard to setting up Apache Externals somewhere, I would suggest that there is no need to provide the original download inside of the Zip that has the external/* if you can provide a stable link to where it is obtained. If this is inside the external/* material, along with any necessary license information, that should allow a common download and extraction procedure for all of them, perhaps a simplification of the current script logic for Windows. Having a place to store those is going to be a problem while obtaining a new location for this kind of archiving is established. It might be preferable to provide them on a committer account until that is handled. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: jan i [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 13, 2015 01:58 To: [email protected] Subject: [PROPOSAL] X64 and libraries. Hi All. As you know I started working on Qt for a desktop editor, and found out we need the 64bit port, so I switched to do that. I am now at a state where 64bit for windows, seems to be working, BUT I had to find and download 64bit versions of all our external libraries, these come as .7z files, which means we would have to extend the extract bat file. I know we will will also need some Qt libraries and possible also a JS framework (for the webapp) so I am questioning if it is sustainable that we keep maintaining our scripted download. Apache used to have a place at google called apache_extras (will be terminated in a matter of days), it is now being replaced with another place. Apache_extras is a good place to keep these externals in a form (original+lib/include) so developers simply download that as one package. I would like to make a zip package that contains: - original library files (zip, 7z etc) - A text file telling from where they were downloaded - files unpacked in our directory structure (externals/*) We can later make similar packages for MacOS, linux etc. where needed. I would put that zip file up on our web page until the situation with apache_extras is cleared (unless Andrea believes the SF version is stable). Thoughts ? rgds jan I.
