Brainstorm time...

It continues to be difficult, especially for newbies, to build OIIO from 
scratch on Windows. Building the dependencies are a big part of the hassle. 
This is exacerbated by my lack of experience with and access to a Windows 
machine (though I did manage to eke out an Appveyor build script, which despite 
being very clunky has drastically cut down the frequency with which I break the 
build on Windows).

Robert has proposed enhancements that allow a build of many critical 
dependencies using Conan (https://conan.io/) here in this PR: 
https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio/pull/1593

I want to put that PR on hold slightly to allow for wider discussion here of 
the alternatives, so that we can collectively decide the best way to achieve 
this. (And by "we", I mean consensus of the stakeholders who depend on Windows 
builds and know more than I do about how to achieve it.

I think the two goals, which may or may not have identical solutions, are: (a) 
for people who need to use OIIO source code (for example, 
developers/contributors) to have an easy way to get/install OIIO's build-time 
dependencies; and (b) for people who only need OIIO binaries and libraries to 
be able to install both the dependencies and OIIO itself as easily as possible 
(ideally just binaries, or if from source, then as close as possible to a 
foolproof one-command download, build, and install of everything).

Possible systems/strategies include:
https://conan.io/                   Conan package manager
https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg  Microsoft Vcpkg
https://github.com/meshula/mkvfx    Nick Porcino's "mkvfx" project

Are there others to also consider?

Maybe take a look at all of these and see what you guys think about the 
relative merits of supporting/using one or more of them as our strategy for 
easier OIIO builds and dependency installation?


--
Larry Gritz
[email protected]


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