What is an SDK

[Bert Peers <rat@larian.com>]

ok finally back online.

Here's a question I wanted to ask for some time and fits nicely
in the slipstream of the recent discussions :

at what point does a nice hack stop being a hack and become an
SDK ?

The story is that I recently got a few URLs from Paul to review for
the SDK listing, and while doing so I discovered that one SDK,
although a fine piece of work, was basically not much more than
an abstraction of the good old DOS A000 pointer, retargeted to
various linux displays (the fbdev framebuffer, whatever GGI gives
you, an X window shared memory piece etc).  Quite nice, but it
wouldn't do much with that pointer.  It gave a few graphics drawing
primitives etc but no surfaces, hw blitting, etc.  To cut a long story
short, I felt that including this type of limited efforts would trigger
a *lot* of new "SDK"s additions, starting with every single lib
(probably tens or hundreds) that supports Linux in the 3D engine
list...

Any thoughts on this ?  Should LGDC list just about everything ?
Or should we limit ourselves to the "serious" stuff ?  But then what
is serious : large files, large teams ?  How could we point
developers interested in contributing to new but promising SDKs
(where Clanlib, Crystal Space etc all began one day) if we skip
the small ones ?  If we don't skip them, how do we prevent that
visitors drown in a database so large that they might as well just
have hit "+linux +games +sdk" in altavista ?....

Help ! :^)

Bert
--

-=<Short Controlled Bursts>=-