Re: [tuxracer-devel] glTron music

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Jules Bean wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2000 at 02:57:44AM -0600, Steve Baker wrote:
> >
> > I'd hate for you to hack out a MikMod subset - only to find that you
> > have to keep doing that every few months when MikMod changes.
> 
> I know this is the opposite of Steve's feeling, but personally I hate
> it when open-source projects gratuitously 'include' a version of
> another library instead of linking to it. With a well-known library
> (whatever that means) whichever distribution (of whichever OS) you use
> should have a handily pre-prepared version.

It's not the opposite of my feeling.  I also hate to include part of
one library into the distribution of another.

However, the alternative is sometimes to require all of our poor users
to scour the web and download and install a half-dozen other libraries,
some of which will inevitably be the wrong version - or won't install
cleanly or something.

I only rely on ONE other package (Mesa) in my present code - and even
so, the volume of support email I have to answer for people who havn't
installed it correctly is more than I like.

I *hate* the idea of increasing that number unless it's absolutely
necessary.  I'm pretty sure that anyone who'se supported a reasonably
popular OpenSource application for any amount of time will heartily
concur.

> If the concern is that it makes it harder for *all* PLIB users, then I
> would certainly recommend the mikmod support be optional in
> PLIB... you'd only need mikmod installed if you wanted to use it's
> file loading code in your PLIB game...

Well, yes - that's an option - dynamically link to MikMod.  At least
that way, games that don't want music don't pay the support price.
But nearly all games need music - so I'm not sure it helps in
practice.

This problem is really putting a serious kink in OpenSource
games development - I don't know *what* can be done about it.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjb...@ai... (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
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