Re: [AD] custom DLLs with cmake

[Chris Robinson <chris.kcat@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 24 December 2008 05:21:54 am Elias Pschernig wrote:
> You can't really build against any other but the official DLL unless you
> compile yourself, as you need the .lib file and not the .dll. And
> there's no way anyone could get the .lib file for the DLL I distribute
> with my game.

Right. But if someone else built Allegro, and D3D or GL got disabled for 
whatever reason ("eh, I'm on Windows. don't wanna pester people/be pestered 
with that OpenGL option..") they'd suddenly have a DLL and lib that was 
different from the norm, without realizing it.

> > Now imagine if it did give you a DLL, you built-against it, then provided
> > just an executable for other Allegro users to test. It inexplicably
> > wouldn't work for them, without any forewarning. :)
>
> That seems unlikely in Windows, you basically always get the DLLs along
> with the EXE.

Generally as a backup, in case the user doesn't have it, not as a replacement, 
I'd think. A simple zipped directory would have it with the exe, but an 
installer could install it system-wide (like OpenAL/DirectX/etc are). If it's 
always going to be the app's DLL+exe, instead of an app's exe with the user's 
DLL, why provide a DLL in the first place? Why not just make it always a 
static lib, letting the linker strip out unused code, and possibly optimizing 
a little better.