Re: SDL Interface Development

[Skeezics Boondoggle <skeezics at q7 dot com>]

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Eric McDonald wrote:

[snip]
>    A while back ago, we considered SDL_Pango for handling of 
> international and exotic text. Pango (which SDL_Pango obviously 
> requires) is not without dependencies either. So I think point (2) is 
> something worth considering. How much should Xconq be able to stand 
> alone? And how much should we cave in to rapid development at the 
> expense of raising the hacker "cost of entry", so to speak?
[snip]

Just to chime in from the Solaris camp - this all sounds great, as long as
the dependent libraries are reasonably cross-platform and the build for
non-Linux/Windows machines (is that the diplomatic way to say "real Unix"  
machines? :-) doesn't become untenable.  I'd say if it's smaller/easier to
bundle those libs with the Xconq sources and build them all in one shot,
that's fine, or we'd need to make sure that the configure script can
easily find them (or be told where to find them) already installed on the
system.

Having lived through the years when "all the world's a Vax", then the
period of "all the world's a Sun" and now "all the world's the hacked up
one-off peculiar Linux box on my desk", I'm just *reeeeeally* tired of
constantly screwing around with and patching configure scripts that assume
too much.  That's my only worry with using third party libs that come with 
a mile-long dependency list...

Also, I've been remiss in building xconq from the latest CVS snapshots for
Solaris... I think something was broken the last time I tried it... oh
geez, almost a year ago!  (November 15th, 2003)  I should grab the latest
sources and see if the existing stuff still builds on Solaris before
griping about possible future changes, eh? :-)

-- Chris