meshlab/src/external

External libraries for MeshLab

This folder contains a set of cmake configuration files to download and build external libraries required by MeshLab and its plugins.

Most of the times, cmake will first try to find the required external libraries, and only if they are not found, it will download them.

Required libraries

The libraries that are required to build MeshLab are:

• GLEW
• easyexif

Without these two libraries (or their relative system provided libraries), MeshLab cannot be built.

Optional libraries

All the other libraries are optional. Cmake adopts the following strategy:

• Try to find the library in the system (if a package of the library exists). If it is found, nothing else need to be done;
• If the library is not found, try to download the source code of the library and place it into the downloads folder. If the download succeeds, the library is built along with MeshLab;
• If the download does not succeed, all the plugins that require that library are ignored and won't be built.