third-party libs as submodules

[BrunoLevy]

Replace bundled third-party libs with submodules

lib/third_party

• glfw
• numerics/(LIBF2C,CBLAS,CLAPACK,ARPACK,SUPERLU): this will be another project with tools for generating the libs automatically from their github repository and f2c:
  • SUPERLU is on github (@starseeker)
  • ARPACK (ARPACK-NG) is on github

lib/geogram/third_party

• amgcl
• libMeshb: done
• HLBFGS
• lua
• PoissonRecon: probably won't do (lots of local fixes...)
• rply
• stb_image
• tetgen: no officiel github repo (but there is a mirror in libigl)
• triangle
• xatlas: lots of third party code in repo (libigl, eigen, ...), can we include just a few files as submodule ?
• zlib: local changes (include path to make sure the right includes are used)

lib/geogram_gfx/third_party

• glad
• imgui
• ImguiColorTextEdit: probably won't do (lots of local fixes...)
• imgui_fonts (can do ?)
• imgui_lua_bindings: probably won't do (lots of local fixes...)

[starseeker]

I don't know if it makes a difference, but I believe SuperLu is on github and actively maintained: https://github.com/xiaoyeli/superlu

[BrunoLevy]

Thank you for notifying, I'll take a look (it is in general better to have a submodule, because we can directly benefit from the maintenance and the evolutions !)

[jdumas]

You may also want to look into FetchContent as an alternative to submodule. Here are some examples in Lagrange. You can see how we use those dependencies in our UI module.

Even if you don't use FetchContent to retrieve the dependency, I think it's important to check first if a certain target exist (e.g. imgui::imgui) before trying to call add_subdirectory() on the git submodule shipped with geogram. This will facilitate integration in third-party projects building geogram as a subdirectory.