[Openexr-devel] Re: MacOS X build directories

[Drew Hess]

"Chris Cox" <address@hidden> writes:

> Drew;
>
> When running this on a daily build system for applications,
> installing to /usr/local/lib is not an option.  We need usable
> libraries in an accessible location within the source tree (in this
> case it should be inside the OpenEXR 1.3.1 directory).
>
> And if automake is doing something dumb, it needs to be changed or
> overridden.  Remember: not all the world is running Linux.


Chris,

I'm sorry if what we supply isn't the ideal build environment for you.
I'm not fond of automake and friends, either, but the fact is that
they're the only portable build system that are installed by default
on OS X and other UNIX-like systems, so that's what we use.

If you don't like automake's default install path of /usr/local,
you can tell configure to put them somewhere else:

  ./configure --prefix=/whatever/path/you/want

and then 'make install' will put the files in
/whatever/path/you/want/{bin,lib,include}

Also, patches for OpenEXR to support other build systems (Xcode, Boost
Jam, etc.) are welcome, if they come with an offer of maintenance.
But we already ship a system that works on OS X, even if it's ugly,
and we don't have time to maintain another by ourselves.

d

p.s. the Visual Studio projects are a necessary evil because automake
et al don't work on Win32 outside of the Cygwin environment, and we
don't think it's reasonable to expect Win32 developers to install that
just to be able to compile OpenEXR, nor do we want to deal with g++
and MSVC++ cross-linking issues.  But the project files are a royal
PITA and I would drop them in a heartbeat if I could.  Of the total
amount of time it takes to release an OpenEXR drop, I spend at least
75% of that time on the damn Visual Studio project files.