Building cavestats

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2011 at 03:12:00PM +0000, Wookey wrote:
> to get dump3d also needs a 
> cd survex-*
> make dump3d
> cp dump3d <website>/noinfo/prospecting_guide_scripts/

For dump3d, you can just use:

./configure --enable-testprogs

> That needs sudo on the server which may not be forthcoming, and you
> don't really want wxgtk-dev onthe server anyway (obviously it can be
> tidied after the build, along with the survex sources). In fact doing
> the build on my home amd64 machine and copying the binary over worked
> OK, despite the server being lenny and my machine being squeeze, but
> this is not guaranteed to work.

I believe lenny to squeeze should be OK (since otherwise all packages
would need to be rebuilt between releases, which doesn't happen).  The
reverse may not work.

> Solutions to this are either a) provide a survex-dev package which
> install a library and headers such programs can use. (does the survex
> build already have provision for making an img library?)

No, the img code is intended to be copied into the source code of
projects using it.  It doesn't strive for a stable ABI in particular.

I'm not sure it's useful to have a survex-dev package really, or at
least not useful enough to justify the substantial work it would need.
Not much of Survex is currently intended to offer a stable API to the
world, so turning it into a library would require going through and
working out what to make public and what of that needs cleaning up.

> b) incorporate cavestats functionality and the dump3d binary into the
> normal survex build (or another survex-utils package). So it can just
> be installed.

I think this is a better approach than (a).

As David suggests, you could run 3dtopos and process the output with a
script.

There's also another option - wrap the img code (with SWIG or by hand)
to allow it to be called from Python or other languages.

> I'm not quite sure if it something others would find useful or it
> really is special-case hackery for CUCC's website. 

I've always intended to fold in cavestats - it's just a matter of
getting around to it.

Cheers,
    Olly