Hi all,

I just sent this off to support, but I thought it would be useful for others to see and perhaps make suggestions ?

-Drew

Hi,

Something for the developers … I'd like a cleaner mechanism to get the correct build environment for hdk projects. In the past (and currently for the OSX build) it's been the case that $HT/makefiles/* haven't been updated to correctly reflect the latest versions of Houdini and in particular the $HT/makfiles don't sync up with hcustom. I'd like to suggest that you add extra functionality to the hcustom tool, or make a new “hdk-config” application, that allows Makefiles to be written without referencing $HT/makefiles includes, removing the need to keep both methods up to date. It should probably be similar to tools like sdl-config, fltk-config etc …The code in hcustom / hdk-config that sets the compile options should be shared to maintain easy consistency.

Besides easing the building of straight forward HDK dso's it will also make it easier to configure 3rd party libraries that need to link in with HDK extensions, something that is more of an issue when you want to extend Houdini on OSX where most libraries aren't built for x86_64 (Macports etc).

E.g.

fltk-config
Usage: fltk-config
Options:



Options telling what we are doing:
use GL
use extra image formats (PNG, JPEG)
use glut compatibility layer
use forms compatibility layer

Options telling what information we request:
return C compiler used to compile FLTK
return C++ compiler used to compile FLTK
return flags to compile C using FLTK
return flags to compile C++ using FLTK
return flags to link against FLTK
return flags to link against static FLTK library
even if there are DSOs installed
return FLTK libraries full path for dependencies

Option to compile and link an application:
compile the program with debugging information




Thanks,
Drew

–
Drew Whitehouse
ANU Supercomputer Facility Vizlab