BF2 server discussion

Andreas Fredriksson andreas.fredriksson at dice.se
Thu Sep 30 05:06:17 EDT 2004


Hey guys,
I'm going over the linkage problems again with the Battlefield 2 server.

I thought maybe we could have this discussion now rather than at ship
:-)

I would like to maintain only one binary this time; so the following
alternatives are available for the linux release:

1) Ship with a dynamically linked version and require libstdc++ >= some
recent version.

Pros: Simple turnaround for releases (this is what I'm developing on)
Cons: Reduces backwards compatibility

2) Ship with dynamically linked version and provide libraries so that
you can set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the "compat" directory provided with BF2.

Pros: Similar to #1.
Cons: License considerations for shipping gcc shared objects.

3) Link statically.

Pros: Easy.
Cons: Breaks horribly on many systems.

4) Link on stone-age era machine to get libc right and link statically
with libstdc++.

Pros: Best compatibility.
Cons: A pain to maintain and increases turnaround time. Also a
borderline legal case.

So the question to this list is; what is the minimum ABI version I can
sensibly require for this product? Remember that we're looking at a 2005
release date. Supporting all the old Red Hats are a lot of pain.

I'm also doing an unsupported native FreeBSD build this time around;
currently based on 4.10-STABLE, would the version 5 series be a better
choice?

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Andreas Fredriksson
==============================
Programmer, Battlefield II

There are 10 types of people in the world -- those who understand binary
and those who don't.



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