On 5 May 2010, at 12:33, Jon S. Berndt wrote: > I'd have to agree with all this. I stopped trying to build FlightGear years > ago because it is highly non-trivial. Having been involved in several large > engineering and training simulations over the years, I can say that in my > experience it's almost always non-trivial. :-) But, I think that if some > effort was expended, that process could be improved and made simpler or more > automated for FlightGear.
To be honest, I'm not sure much simplification is possible - FG *is* a large, complex piece of code, and it doesn't live inside a build ecosystem like Gnome or KDE, so if we don't want to pull every dependency into the sources, there will always be some initial steps. It's more awkward to get building than a Linux kernel, but no worse than (say) Blender or Firefox. On Linux, the steps are (from a clean Ubuntu/Fedora install) - install various -dev packages using apt-get/yum/synaptic (openAL-dev, compiler, freetype-dev, libpng-dev, boost, cmake, cvs/svn/git clients etc) - download OSG, cmake, make and make install - download PLIB tarball, configure, make and make install - download Simgear, configure,make, make install - download FlightGear, configure, make, make install (I've done this recently to validate my Hudson build system for FG) Not trivial, but not exactly the end of the world, either. The situation on Cygwin is not as good, but the same fundamentals apply - just more work has to be done to get FreeType, boost, cmake and so on into place. In each case I don't believe *any* unusual configure arguments are required, except maybe --prefix and --with-osg/--with-simgear; The autoconf script is pretty smart these days, though I wouldn't claim it's perfect :) On Mac and Visual Studio, there's certainly more messing around, but if anyone asks here they will be helped out; probably some better Wiki documentation would help. And, as always, documenting and making beautiful build systems is less fun that hacking code - and most of us *are* doing this for fun :) Regards, James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
