[quake3] Re: quake3 MacOS hackery, continued...

[Ryan C. Gordon]

> Libraries are something to be considered when compiling binaries for
> distribution. It makes no sense at all to have them in /source/
> control.

It's not source control, it's a revision control system. We have the web
site in here, too, for example.

Semantics aside, you need these libraries when building from source as
much as you need them in an installer or at runtime. As I said, it makes
sense for Linux distros to manage these dependencies (or Linux users to
hunt them down, although frankly I don't like the assumption that they
should do more work, but binary incompatibility demands it)...as such I
haven't added them to svn for Linux. But on the Mac and Windows, you
shouldn't be telling people "oh, go find this, possibly build it, also
do this workaround to SDL's build system to make sure it builds
correctly on the Mac, and copy it to the following place, which may be
just about anywhere on Windows"

OpenAL and SDL are not "system headers" ... I'm not advocating adding
stdio.h to subversion here. These are third-party external dependencies
that we rely upon.

You can call it a benefit of Linux development that you can avoid this,
but on other platforms, this makes a lot of sense. Being able to pull
down the latest revision and just build it, regardless of the system, is
a feature, not a bug.

That being said, the OpenAL headers I included were from AL1.0...if this
broke something, let's update them...but it should also demonstrate why
relying on the end-user to supply these is dangerous, since there are
probably users out there with the same headers, and they're either going
to write a bug report which we would have to flag INVALID or they'll go
"this project sucks" and not use it. Or both.

--ryan.