Tomorrow and Friday (Feb 17 & 18), Linden Lab is going to be holding an
in-house Hackathon (stopping work on many other things, getting many
developers together all at once, and focusing on getting a lot done in
short time) to upgrade our builds of all our libraries and the viewer to
a new toolchain, including our new package management tool (autobuild
<https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Autobuild>) and Visual Studio 2010 for
Windows (yes... about time... whatever... we're doing it).
Our goals are simply stated:
1. Get all open source components into repositories under
hg.secondlife.com (eg bitbucket.org/lindenlab/). All the third
party components (things not created by LL) that we incorporate
will be in repositories named with the prefix "3p-". Most of
these repositories exist now, but not all have sources in them yet.
2. Get each component packaged with an autobuild configuration for
whatever platforms it is needed on.
3. Get each component needed on Windows building under autobuild with
VS 2010.
4. Get a TeamCity-automated build configured for each component
repository with the resulting prebuilds of open components
uploaded to public directories.
5. Get the viewer built using the resulting prebuilt libraries, also
under autobuild with VS 2010.
We also expect to integrate some automated viewer testing into our
automated viewer builds, but none of that will be externally visible.
If you make a chart with a row for each component, and a column for each
of 1 through 4 above, it's a lot of boxes to fill in... many have
already been done: there are some complete rows, but it's still a big job.
I will be providing public updates on the wiki (form and location TBD...
watch this thread) and on the #opensl IRC channel of how we're doing and
the status of each public repository.
A non-goal for the Lindens is building the components with Visual Studio
Express. There is currently a limitation (see OPEN-1 in jira) that
makes using Express cumbersome (it requires separate configuration). We
do recognize that Express is important to open developers, and want it
to be supported, but there's only so much we can do ourselves in two
days. There is an autobuild configuration checked in for building the
viewer under autobuild including VS Express:
http://bitbucket.org/oz_linden/viewer-autobuild
I'm going to try to get some supporting documentation up on the wiki
today or early tomorrow. It should be possible for open developers to
help us test whether or not the component builds can be used in Express
as we go along. If people want to do that and feed me changes, I'll try
to get them incorporated in real time as much as possible.
Once all this is done (and it probably will not be merged to
viewer-development immediately after the hackathon), this new toolchain
will be the "supported" way to build the viewer and its dependencies,
which means that if you really need to build with other tools, you'll
have to work out how to do so - we'll consider accepting changes to
support them so long as they're reasonably clean and don't break the
standard way of doing it. Maintaining support for building with older
versions of Visual Studio will _not_ be a goal, and getting review time
for them will probably be hard.
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