Re: GFX under Linux

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

"Adam D. Moss" wrote:
> 
> Katie Lucas wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 03:40:50PM +0600, Mark D'voo wrote:
> > > what was so hard about SDL??
> >
> > The fact that while I download SDL occaisionally to see how it's
> > getting on, nothing ever seems to compile. Here i have a nice shiny
> > Redhat 7.2 system.
> 
> Well, that's depressing.  I'm using SDL in a cross-platform
> GL game partly for its general universality, now I wonder whether
> I chose the right API.  Thankfully (?) source won't generally
> be distributed so difficulty-to-compile doesn't matter much,
> but how difficult do people generally find it to be to run
> precompiled SDL apps?

SDL is spectacularly popular - but I just *dread* installing new
programs that use it.  It may be just my perception - but it seems
like 99 times out of a hundred I either have to upgrade or downgrade
one or other component.  There are gazillions of little parts to it
and they change revision number out of sync.  It's a continual juggling
act to keep a good revision that all the packages I have installed can
live with.

SDL is a good system - but the way it's administered is **poor**.  It
needs to be updated less frequently and to have all of it's parts
rolled out on the same day in the same download from the same website.

The only package I ever watched the mailing list of that used SDL was
TuxRacer - and easily half of the emails were questions about why SDL
wouldn't install.

It's a tough call IMHO.  The benefits of an increasingly widely accepted
library versus the extreme pain of dealing with all the users who have
trouble getting it all to work.

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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