Discourage building from bare git repo, use release snapshot instead about glew HOT 6 CLOSED

See: #31

Try: http://sourceforge.net/projects/glew/files/glew/snapshots/glew-20160402.tgz/download

from glew.

I'm tempted to re-purpose this issue along the the lines that:
cmake ought to recommend a source .zip file download for windows if glew.c etc are not found.

from glew.

Same issue here, it's confusing not to be able to build from github.

from glew.

Not being able to build from github isn't just confusing, it's a showstopper for commercial use.
Admittedly I'm working on a hobby project now, so I'm not NDA'ed - but the short of the matter is, my previous employer refused to use any project that we couldn't use as a git-submodule.

Further the GLEW documentation clearly says I can use the "MS Visual Studio project is provided in the build/vc6 directory." - this is absolutely false.

That said, I'm not some complainer - If someone can in a couple of sentences explain what needs to be done for GLEW to be built on windows (even if that includes writing Cmake instructions) I will GLADLY do the work and post a pull request.
GLEW has been a favourite library of mine for a long time, however "download the binaries" isn't enough for someone like myself.

P.s. This could equally be accomplished by placing the release snapshots within git in a release branch.

from glew.

I agree that assumptions and expectations have changed over time. The challenge is that the code generation all being GNU make, perl and sed has been hit and miss on Windows, and getting daily complaints about that is not so fun. (Hence the advice to grab the binaries or .zip file)

Broadly I'd like the make/perl/sed/bash to be reimplemented in Python for better portability and maintainability. (I'm no perl wizard, I avoid dealing with that as much as possible) . It's not a whole lot of code, and at least it's easy to look in a diff tool where things match or not.

Converting the source release tarballs into a seperate repository is something I'd seriously consider. I'd be a reluctant to have all that bulk in the main repository, though, since it's essentially irrelevant to the day-to-day maintenance of GLEW, from a code-generation point of view.

Beside those points I'm still a bit of a cmake skeptic, even though I use it day-in day-out. It doesn't seem to be going away, but all of that convoluted pseudo-scripting for the sake of compiling one file of C code still seems like overkill, aside from that being the normal workflow nowadays.

So, what would first-class Windows support look like to you? Just git, Python and Cmake and the rest just goes by the wayside?

-- Nigel

from glew.

Pointing to the git-module-and-cmake-friendly alternative, for now:
https://github.com/Perlmint/glew-cmake

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