Re: Anyone on this list?

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Jan Ekholm wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Steve Baker wrote:

> Well, all users I know want binaries. I want to do something like:
> 
> 	% apt-get install foogame
> 
> and then expect to see foogame being upgraded automatically as new
> versions get released, libraries get new versions etc.

But apt-get only comes with Debian (and maybe really recent versions of
other distro's).  People running SuSE 6.x and 7.x or RedHat 6.x don't
have apt-get.

I understand that apt-get is a nice mechanism - but it's not widely used 
by people who are not on the cutting edge.

> It's
> also harder to uninstall, unless you put it all in
> /usr/local/whatever-x.y/ or /opt/whatever-x.y/ and do symlinks.

Most games that I've seen recently don't install themselves at
all.  They generally want you to do this:

   export MYGAME_DATA = /whatever/whatever/whatever/mygame
   /whatever/whatever/whatever/mygame/mygame

...which I generally dump into a script in /usr/local/bin

Then uninstalling is easy - just remove that directory.  However
with disk space costing $1 per gigabyte, I rarely bother uninstalling
anything anymore.  Everything gets dumped onto my 300Gb file server
down in the garage and stays on the disk partition that I don't bother
to backup.

>>Another thing is that because Linux is all about openness and
>>standards with a heavy emphasis on portability, it's hardly any
>>more difficult to write a multiplatform game than it is to write
>>a Linux-only game.  Hence, almost all Linux games that are any good
>>get ported to Windoze.
>>
> 
> Personally I'm still waiting for that "standardization" to affect the
> lives of real users. There is nothing standard in Linux. :) The LSB (or
> whatever it's called nowadays) tries to fix the situation, but it always
> seems to be a few years after current development. We have openness, but
> that openness isn't standardized at all.
> 
> Or did you mean "use ASCII config files in /etc" and "shove the stuff in
> /usr" as being examples of standards?

No - the position of files in the file system is an irrelevence for games.
Everything they need is in their own directory.  The relatively 'iffy' 
state of LSB is mainly a problem during compilation - but it's still not 
a serious problem if you use autoconf/automake because they can go out 
and find the things you need rather easily.

What I meant by standardization is things like using OpenGL and OpenAL 
and SDL, libpng and the standard C library.  Those things work more or
less everywhere - so it's easy to be portable.

My TuxKart game required TWO lines of source code to be changed in order
to run under Windoze.   Both of those were because the code was being 
compiled under MSVC which has a problem with:

  {
    for ( int i = ..... )
    {
    }

    for ( int i = ...... )
    {
    }
  }

...if it had been ported using CygWin, there would have been zero
lines of code to change.

However, if you write a program under Windoze using DirectX, you have
zero chance of it porting to anything else without major surgery.


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