[Mesa-dev] Mesa devel requiring Python

[José Fonseca]

On Thu, 2010-04-29 at 09:50 -0700, Karl Schultz wrote:
> 
> 
> 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?

I just realized it's not just vanilla python. The GL API code generation
requires python-libxml2 .  http://users.skynet.be/sbi/libxml-python/ . 

Jose