Re: Tux Racer 0.10 Released

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Mads Bondo Dydensborg wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 19 Mar 2000, Steve Baker wrote:

> > > ...is two projects I have
> > > yet to figure out how to compile. At some points I have spend most of a
> > > day trying to get them to work, and have finally given up. And, as you
> > > state it always seems to be the support libraries that are the problem.

<snip>

> In my case I _do_ suspect a problem with my configuration. I have more
> versions of Mesa installed then I dare to count. Problem is that I have
> quake, quake2, quake3 and ut working (dual v2, glide, mesa3dfx), and I
> dare not mess to much around with mesas for fear of breaking these games.
> OTOH I do not want to give bug reports that I am not certain about.

Well, it's really not fair to complain that these programs are hard to
install and that RPM's are some kind of answer when it's evident that your
machine is in something of a mess and even with RPM's there is zero chance
that they'd install cleanly.
 
> I was mostly thinking of pingus here. If I am not mistaken, Pingus relies
> on clanlib, that relies on hermes and a couple of other things.

Pingus did install cleanly once I'd tracked down appropriate versions of
ClanLib and Hermes.  I feel that Hermes should really be a part of ClanLib
since I've never come across a program that used Hermes without Clanlib
or vice-versa.

> > I don't produce RPM's and such because it's a LOT of trouble to do so - and
> > the Linux distro guys are good at that.  Since they make profit from doing
> > this, I don't feel any compunction at letting them do the work.
> >
> 
> If I ever get Tux_AQFH going, I could probably supply you with a spec file
> for rh6.x that would make rpm building trivial.

That's really not the point.  I'd still only be able to produce RPM's
for Intel CPU's - with all the attendant dependancies of specific glibc
versions...it's a lot more hassle than I need.
 

> Summary: My posting yesterday was _not_ a bug report for neither Pingus,
> Tux_AQFH or Tuxracer. It was simply a confirmation that "compile troubles
> _do_ stop people from checking things out and reduces the number of
> potential developers". I believe this is a more common problem than one
> would think, but I have no real solution to this. One thing that could
> help was test programs - but isn't ./configure supposed to take care of
> that?

Dunno - I agree that compilation problems are likely to scare off naive
users - but the kind of person who might contribute seems to me to be
more likely to persevere at least as far as asking why it doesn't compile.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)

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