looking for a little help and feedback for irrlicht port (to enable minetest)

[Ken Cunningham]

In my ongoing quest to bring every major open-source game to MacPorts, I've been working on minetest.

Minetest is reported to be the #1 most popular open-source game on the internet. It's been in homebrew for a long time, but was broken there. I fixed it about six months back for homebrew, but I have never submitted it to MacPorts.

The primary reason is it's supporting port, Irrlicht, which is a 3D framework used by a number of different games. Irrlicht is frankly a bit messy. Homebrew builds it as a static library using it's xcode build file, but I know that is not a popular way for macports to inhale such software.

Irrlicht is an older piece of software brought forward through the years. The Unix makefile is not properly written, and the supposed macosx shared library target does not seem to build correctly for me on any system I've tried.

On macOS, everyone seems to use the xcode build file, which does work to make either a static library (a la homebrew) or a framework (which is what I used, building it as a sharedlibrary). To make it work correctly, I more or less built the framework, and then copied the headers into include/Irrlicht/* and spec'd the library in the minetest build. I could have also symlinked the library into lib/irrlicht.dylib from the framework.

I _think_ this might be acceptable in that format for macports, but it is neither pretty nor elegant.

Minetest works perfectly well using this, however.

Would anyone interested in such things be willing to take a look at the Irrlicht build and see if there is a cleaner way to do it than what I have done?

My build file and patches are here:  <https://github.com/kencu/macports-staging/tree/master/devel/irrlicht>

The minetest portfile and associated patches, if anyone is interested in seeing it work, are here: <https://github.com/kencu/macports-staging/tree/master/games/minetest>.


Thanks,

Ken