[impdev] Initial experience building Imprudence + general questions

[Bengt Gustafsson]

Yesterday I downloaded the imprudence source and built it. I had some 
trouble as below, which someone may want to improve.
I think it is very important that it is reasonably easy to start 
developing as many developers may be "lost" to the project if they can't 
get things running quickly enough. Thus below ideas for improvements:

I'm running VS2008 on a win7-64 machine and I already had cmake 
installed in the c:\program files (x86) directory, not in path. That was 
easy to fix, but it would be even better if the py script could sniff 
out where cmake is. This is however quite easy to figure out so it is 
not very important.

I got the PRJ0019 error in the first build due to Bison and Flex not 
being found. I had just downloaded Imprudence source and performed all 
those prerequisite steps stated for Windows develpment.

The reason seems to be that cmake does not find the c:/cygwin/bin 
directory created by the cygwin installation. It generates lines 
containing BISON_NOTFOUND in the vproj files. I tried:

SET CYGWIN_INSTALL_PATH=c:/Cygwin

before running the develop.py script, but strangely this didn't help. 
Maybe cmake decided that nothing needed to be done, I have no deeper 
understanding of cmake, maybe it thought that nothing needed to be done 
and missed the change in the environment.

Finally I resorted to running the bison and flex commands manually, and 
then remove some build step in the vcproj files. I would suggest for 
future convenience that you check in the indra.l.cpp and indra.y.cpp 
files so that all users don't need to do these commands. On windows it 
is painful to get it operating. Not many would need to actually compile 
the lex and yacc sources... Hopefully this would remove the need to 
download cygwin, I don't know what patchutils is used for, is it really 
used in the build process?

----------------------

I have been building stuff in a VR rendition of Uppsala, Sweden in a 
project called Encitra. This was quite painful due to in world build 
tool shortcomings

My aim with this effort is thus mainly to create better build tools in 
world. I have been working quite a lot in 3D CAD such as SolidWorks and 
there are really cool things you can do in those programs that are 
lacking from Imprudence and other SL viewers. I know that someone called 
Qarl Fizz did something in this vein a few years back but it does not 
seem to have been imported into Imprudence.

My question is basically how I should go about this type of development 
with respect to source code handling, so that if I produce something 
useful it can get integrated into the main source code tree.

I would also like to know if I should work in Imprudence or Kokua 
sources. Or are they "mostly" the same?

Also I am a bit worried that the entire project could be close to dead 
as there are no releases now for almost a year. Is there another more 
active viewer project I should join instead?


Bengt (benke_g)


-- 
Bengt Gustafsson
CEO, Beamways AB
Westmansgatan 37
SE-58216 Linköping
Sweden

Phone: +46 13 465 10 85
Cell: +46 705 33 82 59
www.beamways.com
bengt.gustafsson at beamways.com