[osg-submissions] DLL placement on Windows

[Jean-Sébastien Guay]

Hello Brede,

> I would be a happy customer if we could get closer to the build layout
> of OSG 1.2.

I don't know if we can reproduce 1.2 exactly since we've completely  
changed the build system, but please post the specific issues you have  
and ideas as to how to fix them. There are some of those below which I  
can discuss now.

> I believe the BUILD_ALL and INSTALL is confusing for most
> Windows developers.  In VisualStudio we have a button to press to
> build all projects and a setup.exe to install.

Making a setup.exe each time SVN is updated doesn't make sense. For a  
full release, sure, and I think Mike Weiblen does that now. If you  
want more cutting-edge you'll probably need to be more low-level than  
that, and that's where the INSTALL project in the solution file comes  
in.

As long as you have your CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX set to where you want to  
install to, then building the INSTALL project in the VS solution file  
will build OSG and install it correctly. (minus some tweaks we need to  
make, see below)

I agree that on Windows, we're not used to doing an INSTALL, but that  
comes with the CMake territory and it being a cross-platform build  
system... With the changes Robert's suggesting, INSTALL could be  
optionally used to copy the files to another directory, but OSG would  
be usable directly from the source tree after a normal build (F7 in  
VS). That would be a definite improvement.

> From time to time I'm not
> even able to step through the code while debugging (please but the
> .dll and .pdb files in the same folder).

I agree, that should be changed, and it's just a tweak to the CMake  
files I think (copy the .pdb to the same place as the .dll on INSTALL).

J-S
-- 
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay     jean-sebastien.guay at polymtl.ca
                         http://whitestar02.webhop.org/

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