[ODE] documentation initiative

[John Miles]

> Have you ever done any cross-platform development?  Yeah, everyone is
> using windows, but a whole different everyone is using linux, OSX, etc.
> And you have no idea how difficult it is (many times impossible) to make
> something cross-platform without a pre-build step.

The resulting headers from the prebuild step really should be added to the distribution and hand-maintained.  The usual application for a build-time configurator is when you know that the only system you'll run on is the same as the one you're compiling on.  That doesn't apply in this case, and, at any rate, there are no CPU-specific definitions (e.g., AMD versus Intel, SSE versus 3DNow!) in config.h, just platform-specific ones.  You're not going to convince anyone that config.h could only have sprung forth from the brow of configurator.c. :)  

I'm not a multiplatform guru, but I wouldn't say I'm in the "have no idea" category, either.  (I recently wrote a 3600-bps real-time data modem that runs on two of the most disparate platforms known to man -- a 2-GHz AMD-K7, compiled with VC6, and an 16-MHz 8-bit Atmel microcontroller, compiled with GCC -- without the need for anything like what's being discussed here.)
 
> It didn't take us much to build on windows, all you have to do is read
> the Wiki, download GNU make (they point you right to it, and there's no
> "install", just a copy), run a batch file, and type "make".  Simple
> stuff for any programmer. 

... until you try to build a .DLL, which is what many Windows people tend to want, at least during development.  Suddenly, life isn't so simple when you find that dInfinity == 0.0F in your application because the configurator didn't understand how to export symbols from a Win32 DLL properly.

> But I was disappointed that there was no pre-build library and header
> set for the releases.  This should be something to look into, but don't
> expect it to be maintained in CVS.  That's a pain in the ass for people
> not working on windows

True, which is why someone not working in Windows should never even encounter it.  Likewise for the Linux side of things.  

>, which a lot of developers (contrary to your
> claims) do.  Just the releases should be fine.

Unfortunately, as (many) others have noted, that's really not the case.

-- jm