[ODE] documentation initiative

[Adam D. Moss]

J. Perkins wrote:
> At Megan's suggestion, I took a couple of hours earlier today and threw
> together some scripts for premake (http://premake.sourceforge.net/). I
> have packaged them up as a contrib for ODE, you can find them here:
> 
>   http://premake.sf.net/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OpenDE

Hey, this is cool, thanks for pointing out (&writing :)) premake.
In this long term this might evolve into something we can use as
the preferred way to maintain the ODE build process... I'll keep
my eye on it. :)

My concerns right now are:

1) How do we properly integrate the bizarreness of configure.exe
into the premake process?  Its noodling goes beyond the usual
endianness checking and whatnot into realms that can't really be
justified as belonging in Premake, such as the wacky dInfinity
detection (which isn't feasible to do from within the excellent Lua
language but which I think could be shoehorned into a series of
pass/fail C tests -- perhaps Premake could gain the ability to set
build flags depending on the result of compiling and running sets of
C snippets, but then it's turning into Autoconf...).

2) Premake's Makefiles are for GNU make... I *think* we've otherwise
avoided requiring GNU make for ODE (except ironically on win16??),
but that's probably a fairly minor issue.

3) Not really an ODE issue, but I wonder whether Premake could
ever emit recipes for cooking foreign files, for example
.lua -> .luac -- I have no idea whether such a concept even exists
in the VC project world, perhaps a project with such requirements
would have to stick with Makefiles.

4) Premake needs time to mature a little, perhaps. :)  For me:
4a) Premake 1.8 doesn't build as C without the attached patch
4b) Premake 1.8 generates its .d file in the wrong place (all in the
project root dir)
4c) Premake-1.8-generated Makefile fails to link Premake 1.8:
Linking Premake
/usr/local/i686-pc-linux-gnu/bin/ld: cannot open output file ./: Is a directory
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Looks promising though.

Thanks,
--Adam
-- 
Adam D. Moss   . ,,^^   adam at gimp.org   http://www.foxbox.org/   co:3
-------------- next part --------------
diff -ur Premake-1.8/Src/posix.c Premake-1.8.adam/Src/posix.c
--- Premake-1.8/Src/posix.c	Wed Apr 14 01:18:10 2004
+++ Premake-1.8.adam/Src/posix.c	Wed Apr 14 20:45:00 2004
@@ -89,13 +89,15 @@
 
 int plat_findLib(const char* lib, char* buffer, int size)
 {
+	FILE* file;
+
 	if (findLib(lib, "/usr/lib"))
 	{
 		strcpy(buffer, "/usr/lib");
 		return 1;
 	}
 
-	FILE* file = fopen("/etc/ld.so.conf", "rt");
+	file = fopen("/etc/ld.so.conf", "rt");
 	if (file == NULL) return 0;
 
 	while (!feof(file))