Building alembic on windows

[Michel Lerenard]

Hi there,

I've been trying to compile Lucas' branch on windows, and am pulling my
hair off since this morning.
I read the WindowsBuildSteps.html file, and had a look at the cmd
scripts available in the windows folder.
I have not even tried to use them as:
- they need edition to work
- they call at the end fine alembic_bootstrap.py, which i prefer to call
manually.

I have been stuck after setting all include and library path: after
successfully setting boost, exr, hdf5 and zlib libraries (all trycompile
work), the python scripts calls CMake, which tries to check the values
set and defines its own env variables.
(BTW, the script fails to find the correct version of python if not env
variable is set. Why look for python26 on all systems except MacOs where
we look for python27 ?)
The AlembicHDF5.cmake script fails to find HDF5. Apparently it's looking
for two languages 'C' and 'HL', and the include dir for the 'HL'
language is not found. I've tried setting the env variable
"HDF5_HL_INCLUDE_DIR" in the bootstrap script but it has no effect.
I had to make, IN MY CMAKE INSTALL !!!, a modification in the
FindHDF5.cmake to set the value of HDF5_HL_INCLUDE_DIR before we use it
so the script could succeed.

My joy ended shortly after this, as the bootstrap script failed a few
lines later, unable to find OpenGL include dirs. (for which it asked
nothing before)

Being stuck once again raises the same questions I had before about the
compilation method of Alembic:
I have never been able to compile on windows without heavily modifying
the scripts and tweaking the environment. Every time i feel like i
discover new issues in one of the script, and i'm wondering: why do we
have such a complex build system ?
Each time, i'm thinking it would be faster to create the visual
solutions by hand: couldn't we ship visual solution for the windows build ?
It would not be very complex to tune the build to know where to find the
3rd party libraries. (a simple batch setting env variables and calling
msdev.exe after that)

I don't want to start a debate if it has already been discussed, but
from my point of view, we need to simplify the build system, the time
lost to build a new version is too important.


Michel

BTW, i'm using CMake 2.8.10

[Jonathan Garrett]

hi Michael

not a direct answer to your post, but I gave up trying to build the windows version using cmake

I build it directly through visual studio - here's my project files and notes: https://github.com/jonnygarrett/alembic_vs2012

Jonny

[Michel Lerenard]

Hi

i created a solution manually and it worked. ( Took me half an hour...  i made one project for the lib and one for the converter )

Thanks for the link anyway.

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[jun ma]

Hi Michel,

    Do you project solution include python-binding?

Thanks,

Jerry

2013/5/17 Michel Lerenard <micheli...@gmail.com>