Building multiplatform packages

Warning

This article describes a deprecated feature as of Panda3D 1.10.0.

When your packages include some compiled C++ code, including dll’s or exe’s, you will need to produce a different version package for each operating system/hardware platform that you wish to support.

By default, ppackage will detect when a package includes platform-specific files such as dll’s, and will automatically write the platform string into the package specification. This allows you to build the same package on multiple different platforms, and build a different version for each platform. All of the versions can be stored in the same output directory and hosted at the same host URL.

Each time you run ppackage, it is designed to add its contents to an existing directory (or create a new one). It assumes that the output directory represents the complete and current package contents at the time you started.

In order to build multiple packages with different platforms, you will probably need to run ppackage on different machines, one at a time, and direct them all to populate the same output directory. This means either that your output directory should be a shared volume, or you will have to copy the entire output directory from one machine to another between invocations of ppackage. (I find that rsync is a particularly good tool for copying entire directory structures efficiently, but there are many tools that do this in different ways.)

You can also use ppackage to create several different output directories, and merge those output directories into one using the pmerge utility.