Re: [AD] Is there a licensing reason why PNG isn't built-in to Allegro?

[Elias Pschernig <elias@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 19:02 +0200, Siarhei Siamashka wrote:

> > It would add more dependencies.
> > I think we're about pulling all bitmap format stuff out of allegro core.
> 
> One of the reasons to use allegro is that is packs all the needed
> functionality for developing games in it and avoids extra dependencies.
> As allegro is not a 'mainstream' library, stripping it into parts will
> make using it much more complicated.

I think, it's mainly a question of packaging. Already now someone could
distribute a version which has useful addons included.

I'd like something like SDL-image for allegro 4.3, so all the image
format loaders would be a separate package (also the useless formats
that are now built into the core, like BMP, TGA, PCX), and then it would
make a lot of sense to specify at configure time that you want e.g. PNG
or JPG support included. Again, packages could contain both
allegro-4.3-core (with no image formats at all) and
allegro-4.3-imageformats, to form a complete and easy to use library.

One small problem is licensing, probably would just require the packager
to read through the zlib license though if it is possible.

> 
> Why not intergating loadpng and jpgalleg into allegro with the
> possibility to disable them on configure step? Linux kernel does not
> seem to suffer from bundling lots of device drivers with it as only
> those that are needed by the end user are really compiled and they do
> not add any 'bloat'.

Yes, the linux kernel approach might also work. Then we would simply
pull the libpng sources into the allegro SVN. But I don't know, somehow
I dislike it.

> The reason for this suggestion is simple, as far as I know, current
> jpgalleg is NOT amd64 compatible. If it was a part of allegro library,
> that portability issue would have been resolved long ago.

Well, the developer situation is not good at all for allegro, and
jpgalleg is a very special library (Angelo wrote his own decoder instead
of simply using libjpeg) - so not sure one of the allegro devs would
like to debug that code.

-- 
Elias Pschernig