[ruby-opengl-devel] Windows support

[Ronald Pijnacker]

Hi again,

> >> I just stumbled on the ruby-opengl project and I am really
> >> enthousiastic, since I was missing opengl extensions in the 0.32x
> >> versions.
> >>
> >> However my main development platform is windows, and I noticed  
> >> that that
> >> is not yet supported. Is there any particular reason?
> 
> 	I've not had time to sit down and see how easy it is to get mkrf which
> is the build tool ruby-opengl uses to generate dlls for Windows.  From
> a glance it did not seem like it would be trivial but I'm not a Windows
> developer guru either.
 
I downloaded mkrf and subscribed to the mailing list. 
I will try to update mkrf to the point where at least ruby-opengl can be
build using the windows tools.
 
> >> I would not mind spending some time getting this in place, so ... how
> >> can I help?
> >
> > With some fiddling around (editing the generated Rakefiles), I got
> > everything compiled. Where/who should I contact to get the changes  
> > into
> > the trunk?
> 
> 	Please send the patches to me or post them to this list.  I'll  
> review them
> and see about merging them into trunk and/or just hand generating a  
> gemfile
> so that other Windows users don't have to go through hoops just to  
> compile
> ruby-opengl on Windows.

Some questions before I start submitting patches:

- Did I see correctly that the former name 'opengl.so' is abandoned for
  two separate names 'gl.so' and 'glu.so' ?

- I put glext.h in the source directory to be able to compile parts of
  the code (particularly everything > gl version 1.5, since microsoft
  stopped updating opengl from version 1.4.

- How should the dependency on glut be handled? Do we assume that some
  version of glut is available? If so, where? Currently, I just
  downloaded glut.h and put it in ext/glut/GL/ and linked against
  glut32.lib that comes with the one-click-installer.

- Currently the rakefile in common and the generated onces too assume
  the object-file extension is .o . However, cl requires -Fo to name the
  object file, so either this should be used, or we should use .obj on
  windows. Is there a preference for either choice?

> 	What might be better is if I could convince you to examine the mkrf
> project and see about fixing the Generator class so it emits the proper
> Rakefile for compiling under Windows as this would be a great boon in
> making it easy to reduplicate the build process for ruby-opengl bindings
> on Windows.

As mentioned above, I will make an effort to that end.

Groeten,

  Ronald.