[SDL] Installation of binary apps on linux

[Peter Mulholland]

Hello Michel,

Tuesday, December 5, 2006, 9:36:42 AM, you wrote:

> No, I really did type "exotic patch". Probably not the best choice of 
> words, but "environment" is a tech term too. Anyway, the important word
> was "exotic": running with game-supplied libraries instead of the 
> system-supplied ones.

This isn't what I'd call exotic, it's actually quite necessary as I
found out with Airline Tycoon and Northland - you CANNOT guarantee the
user's machine will have a working SDL, SDL_mixer etc.. and simply
telling them to install those is a nightmare (especially when distro's
package broken ones!)

Likewise, you cannot guarantee the user's system will have the right
versions of crucial things like libstdc++. Look at the old Loki
titles, they needed updates just to be compatible with newer libc.
Again, simply telling the user to have the right version of such libs
on their machine is impossible.

> Exactly. On Windows you see each and every installer replace system exes
> and dlls. <SHUDDER>.

Not these days, especially not for games - DLL's are normally inside
the program's folder only. The only global component that typically
gets updated by a game installing, is DirectX.

-- 
Best regards,
 Peter                            mailto:darkmatter at freeuk.com