mosra
commented
5 years ago Sorry to hear you had this experience.
For general use and local development, the project provides almost a dozen different packages for various package managers, now with Conan and Hunter being added to the mix. In your case I think either the Vcpkg or MSYS packages would suit most and the workflow there is mostly painless, as the package maintainers went through all the hell for you.
On the other hand, if you want to build yourself, you usually don't need everything, especially not the obscure things like harfbuzz. And for almost every plugin there's an alternative without external dependencies to make building easier -- for example, the StbImageImporter plugin for general image loading or the StbTrueTypeFont for fonts. These cover 90% of use cases and don't require anything extra, as everything is bundled in this repo.
Yes, there could be a better overview of the various plugins together with suggestions for the most painless setup covering most cases. I have this on my TODO list, wasn't able to wrap it up it in time for the current release.
I'm afraid your suggestion with the magnum-deps repo is not feasible -- if I'm counting correctly, there is around 20 optional external dependencies and the list is growing with every release. Note the emphasis on optional -- out of those 20, projects based on Magnum usually need just two or three external dependencies. Some of the dependencies are quite huge, some are proprietary so it's not possible to put them in a repository, and every library has its own different buildsystem. Unix Makefiles, Visual Studio projects, CMake, Meson, bazel, gyp ... To actually make things easier for the users, I would need to replicate buildsystems of all the libraries and unify them to a single buildsystem; just shovelling everything to a single place wouldn't solve anything. I was responsible for something similar in a past project and keeping it all running and up-to-date was a full-time job -- and there it was only 5 dependencies. That's why Magnum is aiming to support as many packaging systems as possible -- to reuse packaging work done by other people, instead of having to do it all again from scratch.
hunt978
It took me about 8 hours to finally build magnum through out Corrade to project magnum-plugins, what A STEP !!! what cost the most of my time is searching for the correct depended packages and build it, as a matter of fact, i was giving up to build harfbuzz, cuz maybe there is a dependency hell. sometime, there will be some necessary renaming needed to be done, cause the cmake script only accept specific pattern of file arrangement. /package/ci/appveyor* helps a lot through out the process. thx for releasing the scripts.
so, here comes a "fair" call that why not creating another repos, like magnum-deps to collect all the packages needed by magnum components and connecting the cumbersome building processes.