Up until now OGRE has been distributed with all the dependent libraries required to make it easy to build. However, this is starting to get cumbersome and is also cluttering the CVS repository, so over the next few days this will be changing. The dependencies are mainly aimed at Windows users, since Linux comes preinstalled with all the libraries OGRE needs (libpng, jpeglib, SDL, zlib, freetype).
We will still make a dependencies download available to people using Windows so that they can build easily. However, you will need to do a bit of extra configuration, adding the dependencies to your include path and making sure you build them before building OGRE for the first time. But I’m sure you can handle it. 😉
If you’ve currently got all the dependencies from CVS, make a copy of the ‘Dependencies’ folder now, otherwise when we clear them out of the repository, CVS will clean up and remove them for you next time you ‘update’, so you’ll need a copy. You could also download them from the new dependencies package, but if you copy them now you’ll save yourself the download.
On another note, all future OGRE snapshots / downloads will be in .tar.bz2 format (TAR archives compressed with bzip2). This is because the bzip2 compression ratio is far superior to zip (by a factor of 2 most of the time). Linux bods get tar/bzunzip2 inbuilt, Windows users can open them with recent versions of GUI tools like PowerArchiver, or just get the command line tools for free from their open-source sites.