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

["runesabre" <runesabre@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Here are my thoughts from a customer support point of view.

Fewest number of moving parts and greatest ability to control what parts are
moving is what I strive for.  

As a developer, I understand not wanting to bloat a codebase as well as
wanting to create a highly configurable tool.  More moving parts, however,
means more chance for failure which generates customer support issues which
is costly for me as well as a hassle for my customers.
 
Take Linux, for example.  I want to know that the application I built is
working within the same context on my customers machines.  I don't want my
application built using Allegro 4.2.0 using my customer's 4.0.0 Allegro
install.  If I use PNG I want to make sure my application is using whatever
PNG libraries I built and tested it with and not accidentally using whatever
happens to be installed on my customer's machine.

I don't want to rely on the customer building their own Allegro environment
because invariably something wrong will happen and I'll spend hours chasing
down individual issues which takes time away from enhancing my service,
causes downtime for my customers and costs money.  I also don't want to have
to build variations of the same application to cover weird configurations on
the same distribution.  

It would be much easier from a customer support point of view to have a
single, uber Allegro library built that has built-in support for every
video, bitmap loading, input and sound option available and then do the
right thing when running on my customer's machine and know how to properly
pick the best of whatever options are available.

With everything built into Allegro, it increases the chance that problems
will be caught and fixed since everyone is using the same engine.  Breaking
it up into parts means less chance that problems will be discovered since
the Allegro user base will be more fragmented.

Kirk Black
Owner / Developer / Administrator
Family Time! Interactive, L.L.C.
Mobile: 512.771.5762
Email: runesabre@xxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: alleg-developers-admin@xxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:alleg-developers-admin@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Evert
Glebbeek
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 4:16 PM
To: alleg-developers@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [AD] Is there a licensing reason why PNG isn't built-in to
Allegro?

On Friday 24 March 2006 18:02, Siarhei Siamashka wrote:
> 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'.

This is easy to do on *nix: simply have configure check for zlib and libpng 
and compile Allegro with png support if both are present. Easy.
The problem is that this type of dependency checking is a pain in the rear 
on Windows.
As for including libpng and zlib in the default Allegro distribution... I'm 
still not a fan of that because if I have them installed it feels 
redundant to have Allegro install and build them again - especially if it 
staticlinks them and I want to use the shared objects. Of course, 
configure can take care of all that, so again, *nix would not be a 
problem.

Evert


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