[libksd-devel] Share Libraries and Plugins...

[David S. <xe...@ne...>]

It has been a long time since I made a "productive" post to the mailing 
list; I hope *someone* still reads it!


Today I just commited some major changes to the code and the build 
system that have improved shared library and plugin support.  First of 
all, I updated some insane things I was doing in the build system that 
are no longer needed with the new version of libtool.  Second, I 
replaced the former implementation of TSharedLibrary with a 
libltdl-based one.  This gives has a number of advantages:

1. In the old implementation, you would have to add the plugin directory 
and the current one to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  It would look something like this:

   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:.:/usr/local/lib/plugins/ksd

This is no longer needed.  It should work "out of the box"!

2. The filename used to open a shared library will be modifyed to suit 
the system it is on.  This means that you specify "libimage.so"  on 
windows it will load "libimage.dll".  You can also specify file names 
without extensions (which I prefer! ;-)

3. It will emulate or add support on platforms that do not have shared 
libraries.  You can either preload the libraries OR install GNU DLD (a 
dynamic linker).

The moral of the story is that I believe the plugins will work on any 
*nix system.  I would *really* appreciate it if everyone could download 
the most recent CVS and test it out.  You have to configure the library 
with the --enable-plugins option and you *MUST* install it before any of 
the demos will run.

	-- David Snopek

PS: This change was initiated in an effort to produce Windows binaries. 
  I hope to be reaching that goal fairly soon.

/-- libksd --
| The C++ Cross-Platform Game Framework
| Only want to write it once??
| http://libksd.sourceforge.net
\------------