Best DevIL version to use? Should ReSIL be used over DevIL?

[ahundt]

I'm trying to figure out which version of DevIL is best to use. ReSIL? DevIL?
In particular I'd like to update homebrew as mentioned in #19

Options include:

• A very sensible set of cmake changes
  • seems like it may be the best option
  • even includes the make install step! this is key
• The sourceforge repo is obviously outdated compared to this github repo
• ResIL, which you recommended on your website in 2013
  • ResIL on sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/resil/
  • ResIL on github: https://github.com/ScaledLizard/ResIL
• All these interesting fixes, which don't seem like they can merge anymore
  • Include stdlib.h instead of deprecated malloc.h #8

I guess a modicum of minimal help would be appreciated! That would consist of merging the cmake changes release zip produced so I can update the homebrew script.

Perhaps resil has even more high quality changes, but I'd completely understand if you're not available for something larger like that, or even the smaller change mentioned above.

[ahundt]

@bcampbell you may also be interested and/or able to help answer this question if @DentonW isn't available. Thanks!

[bcampbell]

Obviously, I'm biased ;-)
For now I'd love to see some people hammering on the cmake stuff I've been working on.
That probably means using my fork for now, but I'd like to see it merged back into the original @DentonW version if he's still up for that.

The stuff I've been doing is aimed at stabilisation - just tidying up the build system and sorting out issues on various different compilers (mainly to do with inline differences under VisualC vs gcc vs clang and C++ vs c89 and c99...).

I found ReSIL a little opaque and windows-centric, but I've not checked out the github-hosted one yet. Same goes for the other recent activity in the various forks - I've not picked my way through the changes there, but that's the next logical step.

I'm going to be away for the next couple of weeks, but happy to coordinate with any sort of consensus that forms.

I'm not too up on homebrew, but my basic CMake setup seems to work OK on my test mac, albeit in a unixy libs&headers sort of way rather than spitting out a nice, Apple-y .framework. But I suspect libs&headers are probably what you need for homebrew anyway...

Good luck - I look forward to catching up with any activity when I get back!

[bcampbell]

I'm aiming to start collecting patches in my fork (https://github.com/bcampbell/DevIL) for now. There's useful-looking stuff in the various forks on github, and from downstream sources (eg, Debian and some of the BSDs have their own fixes and patches which we should really pull in).

So please feel free to send pull requests my way!

My goal is to get it all stabilised, solid and reliably cross platform. Something people can take away and package (hi, @ahundt!)

[bcampbell]

With that in mind, I'm thinking about ditching support for autotools, and just supporting CMake.

The main rationale is that CMake seems to be a better option for use on windows, and possibly better (or at least no worse) for other platforms.
Supporting both build systems in parallel seems unnecessarily complicated. I think the source would be a lot more approachable with only one of them.

Does anyone have any strong opinions on this?

[ahundt]

@bcampbell since cmake provides generators for many other build tools this seems like a wise choice

[DentonW]

I would definitely like to use CMake exclusively in the future, especially due to its Windows support. I'd like to look at bcampbell's fork soon.

[bcampbell]

Cool - I'll start preparing a branch with all the non-Cmake stuff stripped out, so we can see how it feels. I think it'll be a lot clearer. At the moment, it can be a bit confusing knowing wihich files are part of which build system.

[bcampbell]

OK, so I've made a new branch:
https://github.com/bcampbell/DevIL/tree/cmake_cleanup

In it, I have:

• zapped most of the autotools stuff
• removed the various project files, which should now instead be generated by CMake
• updated some READMEs and deleted ones which are no longer relevant or would now be confusing

I haven't done anything in examples, tests or docs yet.

So, by following the steps in README.cmake it all works pretty smoothly for me under linux (ubuntu), but it'd be nice to get some feedback from people trying it on windows and mac.

[DentonW]

For some reason, the DevIL project under Windows fails at the linking stage with "LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'DevIL.lib'". I haven't yet been able to figure out why it's trying to link against the library that it's supposed to be creating.