[Mesa-dev] Mesa devel requiring Python

[Karl Schultz]

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 9:54 AM, Brian Paul <brianp at vmware.com> wrote:

> Was: "Merging GLES1/2 to mesa/main"
>
> Chia-I Wu wrote:
>
>> 2010/4/29 Kristian Høgsberg <krh at bitplanet.net>:
>>
>
>  Yeah, I noticed... I don't have a good answer.  I guess core mesa
>>> doesn't generate on the fly because we don't want to require python as
>>> part of the build process(?) and also so that when we distribute mesa,
>>> all the files are in the tarball.  I don't know if we can move to just
>>> generate everything, but we can always just generate the es1 and es2
>>> api files and commit them.  That would solve the ordering issue you
>>> mention below too.
>>>
>>
>  I am not a fan of having generated sources in git, but I don't have a
>> strong
>> opinion here.  Especially when I do not have a better solution :)
>>
>> Ideally, I would like to have python a requirement for developers.  And
>> those
>> sources are generated when making a release tarball so that python is not
>> a
>> requirement for users.
>>
>
> I'd be in favor of that (requiring Python to build Mesa).  Afterall, it's
> already needed for building with SCons.
>
> Karl Schultz (if you're reading this), would this be hard to deal with on
> Windows with MSVC project files?
>
> Also note that we have some lex/yacc-generated files in Mesa too.  I'd
> leave those as-is for now.
>
> -Brian
>

It is probably doable.  Visual Studio allows the specification of
"pre-build" or "custom-build" steps that can include invoking any external
commands.  This is how the predefined shaders get built in 7.8.  I'd just
have to create the appropriate build steps to generate the required files.
These build steps would presumably call a python executable with the name of
the python script and parameters.

The catch is that anyone wanting to build this would need to install python
on the Windows box.   I see (and have installed) ActivePython 2.6.5.12 from
activestate.com.  I suppose that there may be other choices.  But installing
this package adds the Python binaries to the users PATH, which may help
avoid needing to have the user config the build step to locate Python.

The only downside I see is the new requirement of installing Python for
people using the Visual Studio.  I don't regard that as a show-stopper,
IMHO.

What version of Python is needed to run these build scripts?  Are there any
other prerequisites?

Karl
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