[ODE] documentation initiative

[John Miles]

> > ... 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.
> 
> Touché.  Didn't try that.

I don't think it happens to everybody, for whatever reason.  I'm still not sure I understand the exact source of the problem, because I didn't have much time (read: patience) left to poke at it once I realized what was going on.  But it's definitely an issue that people need to watch out for when they use the existing DLL build configuration.

> > >, 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.
> 
> You're talking about a lot of developers working on platforms other than
> Windows?  Well, I beg to differ, but for the sake of supressing a
> nah-uh/uh-huh argument, I'll just leave this where it is.

No; sorry -- I should have clarified that I was arguing against solving the problem by including binary releases.  I'm not an evangelist for any one platform in particular.

That'd be helpful to some users, certainly, but by and large, anyone who's using ODE should be able to compile it themselves... *if* the instructions are complete, reliable, and don't depend extensively on third-party tools that are unfamiliar to the users of a given platform.

-- jm