sherm1
commented
8 years ago With @billhoffman's help I was able to get drake-visualizer built from his branch. I'm copying our email exchanges here to preserve the contents:
From: Bill Hoffman [mailto:bill.hoffman@kitware.com] set WORKSPACE=c:\Users\hoffman\Work\drake\draketest set PATH=%WORKSPACE%;%WORKSPACE%\build\bin;%WORKSPACE%\build\lib;c:\Anaconda2;c:\Anaconda2\Library\bin;%PATH% set PYTHONPATH=c:\Anaconda2\Lib\site-packages\;c:\Anaconda2\Lib;%WORKSPACE%\build\lib\site-packages;%WORKSPACE%\build\lib\site-packages\VTK-5.10.1-py2.7.egg;c:\Anaconda2\DLLs drake-visualizer
So, did that build work for you?
From: Michael Sherman [mailto:sherm@tri.global] Well it functions (which is definitely a plus!) but I have no confidence that I could build it again. So it seems like a great start but I think it still needs further automation or at least a good set of instructions. I'm also unclear on the effects of the requirement to use Anaconda python. I would like to be able to set up my machine and build drake-visualizer, drake-superbuild, and drake without having to change environment variables or reinstall python in between. Should we require Anaconda python in general for Drake? (I don't have any objection to that I just am unclear on the implications.)
From: Bill Hoffman [mailto:bill.hoffman@kitware.com] OK, that is good news that it works for you. They python numpy is a problem on Windows for sure. I figured Anaconda Python would be the easiest path for that. I guess we could experiment with numpy from here: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy In retrospect, if we had let Anaconda python put itself in your PATH, things would have gone smoother. What do you think of this:
- required numpy installed with python
- suggest that Anaconda python be used and let it add itself to your PATH. Users will still need to set the PYTHONPATH, but they would have to do that no matter. It has to be set for things to work.
From: Michael Sherman [mailto:sherm@tri.global] Requiring numpy and proposing Anaconda seems good as long as that won't break any other Drake pieces. The PYTHONPATH seems like a mess though. Fine if it just has basic python stuff like Anaconda/Lib, but it seems very awkward to have to set it to point into the visualizer binary directory. I had to set mine to include, among other things: C:\Users\Sherm\Documents\GitHub\billhoffman\drake-build-r\install\lib\site-packages\VTK-5.10.1-py2.7.egg That seems a little much to expect a user to do successfully! Also, I didn't not have to have PYTHONPATH set in order to run the old drake-visualizer binary that Russ gave me a few months ago. Is there some way to get the necessary info built into the visualizer, or maybe collocated with it in a way that doesn't require an environment variable?
From: Bill Hoffman [mailto:bill.hoffman@kitware.com] OK, I will research why we need to set the python path and if there is something we can do about not not needing it.
david-german-tri
if this proves difficult, then providing the precompiled version as a cmake external project would be a reasonable short-term fallback.