Posted by
peterk on
Jul 22, 2014; 12:07pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/gluegen-examples-needed-tp4031123p4032622.html
Far from bashing I am a great supporter of oss, and try where I can to direct resources to it.
But I find systemically there is a tendancy for people (including myself) to poorly document the "getting started" part - mainly because it is annoying and one of those things that once you know it you no longer see it the same way and think "they should know that" or it has become so second nature you forget that others need to learn it.
The result is often a high frustration level that really prevents many people from adopting otherwise fantastic systems that deserve support. And few wish to revisit the process once thay have gotten over getting set up.
I hope you understand I am actually trying to help :)
Thanks for working on it.
PK
Sent from my phone.
-------- Original message --------
From: "gouessej [via jogamp]" <
[hidden email]>
Date: 07/22/2014 04:38 (GMT-05:00)
To: peterk <
[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: gluegen - examples needed
Thank you for your detailed observations which might help to improve the documentation. I really hope that your suggestions will lead to less frustration for the next GlueGen adopters (especially concerning jni.h).
However, keep in mind that "bashing" OSS / free software isn't the best way of getting any help. We do what we can with the mean that we have. I remind you that OSS / free software libraries don't have a monopoly on bad documentation and when you don't have access to the source code, in my humble opinion it is even worse, it gives you no chance to understand what you try to use.
Moreover, building DLLs with MS Visual Studio is a very bad idea because an end user might have to run a MSVCR installer in order to make your program work if its DLLs aren't found and relying as little as possible on proprietary softwares when building a (proprietary or not) library is both sane and wholesome. You're not the only one to use MS Visual Studio, a former colleague sent a patch to build JOGL with it and it has never been included which is fully intentional even though I was a bit skeptical at that time and I think that maintaining a single code path for GCC is more useful than maintaining 2 code paths including one whose usefulness is debatable and which won't be used to produce the "official" builds.
Finally, a good documentation helps but in my humble opinion, there is an increasing tendency of laziness in the wannabe programmers, there are a lot of people who don't really want to understand what they are doing, they just want to obtain results by asking superficial questions. It's probably not your case as you spent some time in explaining what was "wrong" but some tools aren't used a lot even with an excellent step by step documentation mostly because understanding them takes too much time for those people who want a result right now, immediately, with no intellectual effort. For example, creating a Minecraft-like game with ArdorCraft is very easy, there are already several runnable examples, it should be motivating except for those who want to create a game in one week. Therefore, we won't discourage any developer from using SWIG instead of GlueGen even with the best documentation of the world.