Re: Building on Win32 - the real problem

Okay I was planning on hacking XS today (http://yapgh.blogspot.com)  
but David makes a lot of good comments.

On 31-Aug-09, at 9:17 AM, David Goehrig <[email protected]> wrote:

> Ages ago all of the xs code was broken out into separated files. We  
> switched over to a monolithic build with conditional compilation due  
> to the problems of maintaining coherency in the face of nested  
> dependencies.
>
What if this was fixed with Alien::SDL as it is doing for windows now?  
Kmx is also working on strawberry compatible makefiles. This way we  
can compile for most platforms from scratch.
> One of the things the old build scripts did that the new pseudo-cpan- 
> friendly ones do not was it prompted you as to what would be built  
> and gave you an option to fix the dependencies.
Is prompting recommended in CPAN?

> Since some SDL addons require other SDL addons it is important to  
> make sure you link against the same versions of each Lib.

> I would argue the correct solution is to require all deps by default  
> with an option not to load at run time. The reason to this is when  
> packaging a distro you want a standard package to build against.  
> Hence the kitchen sink approach.
>
However some of these deps are not even used right now. Like vnc and  
svg.
> If I apt-get sdl-perl I would want the full install. If I'm  
> engineering a resource constrained device I am already assuming  
> enough effort to make making a cut down build worth my while. At  
> which point the monolithic should still just work.
>
Shouldn't distro distro specific be up to package maintainers of the  
platform. For example one kmx's build scripts are ready Alias or  
CSJewell will take over strawberry's packaging.
> I personally perfer to make design decisions that meet the needs of  
> the 90% of users who are just expecting it to just work. The other  
> 10% you can never please anyways :)
>
Agreed. But there is only so much I can do for packaging.
> Dave
>
> Ps we by definiton are in that 10%. So our opnions don't count.
>
>
> -=-=- [email protected] -=-=-
> On Aug 30, 2009, at 4:48 PM, chromatic <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Sunday 30 August 2009 00:45:15 Andreas Lund wrote:
>>
>>> Yet again I have decided to try building SDL on Win32 and yet  
>>> again I have
>>> not even made it to the actual building. Why? Because only about  
>>> half the
>>> required libraries can be downloaded for Windows.
>>
>> That brings up a good point.  SDL_perl 2.x builds a monolithic XS  
>> which
>> attempts to link against plenty of SDL-related libraries, such as  
>> SDL_ttf and
>> SDL_gfx.
>>
>> Even though distribution becomes slightly more complex, I suggest  
>> that
>> SDL_perl 3.x build separate XS files for these supplementary  
>> libraries.
>> Perhaps they could even be separate CPAN distributions.
>>
>> It might be worth considering something similar for the OpenGL  
>> components as
>> well.
>>
>> -- c