Horde3D

Hi devs/maintainers, thanks for reading this.

I have taken an interest in Horde3D, and the liberty of packaging it for Ubuntu (PPA).

Right now, horde3d is available as a daily package for Precise (12.04) i386 in my PPA, so if you're already running Ubuntu 12.04 beta you can just add the PPA ( and do a quick (this will also install any dependencies ).

Oneiric (11.10) might follow soon, for amd64 some linking needs to be fixed (set -fPIC? see buildlog please).

I have created the Horde3D project on Launchpad but noone is maintaining it there yet. (Any volunteers? )

ATM launchpad syncs the community SVN to BZR and runs a build recipe that basically just calls cmake, so everything that cmake install installs will be part of the package. That's horde3d (library and header files) for now. No GameEngine, no Editor; maybe someone could get around to expand the CMakeLists to support them, so that individual packages (horde3d-gameengine, horde3d-editor) could be built..

A question that arose from looking into all this:
- some libs like glfw, ogg.. seem to be statically linked / built within the project. Why is it that horde3d doesn't use the shared libraries that already are available on most systems (or could be automatically installed with the horde3d package, since it would depend on them)?

I'd appreciate any input/feedback.

Thanks for your support. The main development system we used when developing Horde3D and it's components was windows. On those systems the vorbis and ogg libs are normally not present. Another reason was possible incompatibilites with different installed versions of glfw, vorbis, etc.

The editor is already build using CMake since a few weeks. So it shouldn't be a problem to integrate it. But AFAIK there are no install targets defined in the CMake files. Or are there default targets when using CMake?

I know it's the modern linux way to install everything via a package manager, and that it's very user-friendly to do so... but...
Coming from a professional software-development perspective, relying on unversioned, uncontrolled shared libraries is just not a feasible practice. When building your product, you need to be in control of exactly which code is being linked into it - if you're relying on any kind of system-wide variables (such as user-installed shared librares), then this becomes harder and harder.

Moreover, if I had two differnt games on my PC which were developed using Horde3D, I would not expect both of them to be sharing the same Horde3D.dll / Horde3D.so file. Each game should be self-contained, and ship with the specific version of Horde that was compiled by that game developer -- so "installing horde" doesn't really make sense to me.

That said, when I use Horde, I actually delete it's copy of the glfw folder and instead link it against my own one....

Hi @Fooguy
Any chance of updating the PPA for current Ubuntu ?

Cheers
S