Re: [AD] Unix-specific distributions

[Shawn Hargreaves <shawn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

George Foot <george.foot@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> The attached patch includes a script `misc/mkunixdists.sh', which is 
> passed the name of an Allegro .zip archive.  It produces a corresponding 
> .tar.gz archive, after running `fixunix.sh', and then removes various 
> chunks of the distribution and patches `makefile.in', and creates another 
> .tar.gz archive for end users.

Excellent stuff, thanks for doing this.

> All that's in this archive is just enough to build the library and install 
> it and the headers.  I was considering whether we should provide the setup 
> program (though this makes the makefile patching in the script a little 
> deeper) and some of the tools which distributors might be using in their 
> makefiles (e.g. I've used `dat').

I think tools like dat are enough outside the normal course of operations 
that we don't need to include them. I'm not so sure about the setup program, 
though: is that part of Allegro that we need to supply, or an optional 
component that the programmer should include for themselves if they want it?

Grzegorz Hankiewicz recently suggested the idea of embedding the setup code 
into your own programs, so setup.c now has a bunch of defines to enable 
that: you can rather easily just #include "setup.c" somewhere in your game 
code, and then call it from one of your menu options. I'm not sure how 
important that option really is, but if we distribute the setup ourselves, 
we are certainly discouraging people from being more creative in how they 
use it.

Although, to date I've noticed almost nobody actually including the setup 
util along with their games. I'm not sure whether that means that we need to 
provide it separately, or that popular opinion has decided that it just 
isn't needed, though.

> You can either leave it as a separate script, or call it from the end of 
> `zipup.sh' -- or merge it with zipup if you want to.

I think it has to stay separate. I run zipup.sh in win95, so it will have 
access to the compilers for building djgpp/Watcom/MSVC dependency files 
first. It will still work in Linux, but can't create the right dependencies 
there (I could probably manage to get that working if I cared badly enough, 
but it is easier to just do it in Windows). But the tarball has to be 
created in Unix, so it can get the executable flags set right.


--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn@xxxxxxxxxx - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"A binary is barely software: it's more like hardware on a floppy disk."