Please let me attempt to diffuse what seems to ne a landline beneath a
sacred cow.
The assumption should be that any developer is also an end user. Just
because you have mingw installed doesn't mean you know how or want to
use it.
Same goes with CPAN. Just because it is there doesn't mean that it
must be used. Most end users prefer to use a method other cpan for
installing app and modules, such as ports apt or yum, or an msi file.
Sdl-perl has been in cpan for 9 years and that hasn't helped much. It
has been on the backs of the deb and rpm maintainers to make everthing
play nice. And I would credit guillaume and friends for getting things
packaged and out there.
By all means we should have a working code base in CPAN, but it is not
the correct solution for 90% of the end user / developers. This
problem is not unique to sdl-perl, it is common across all large
middleware platforms.
The model to think of is games that require the latest directx and
require you install that.
Dave
-=-=- d...@nexttolast.com -=-=-
On Aug 31, 2009, at 9:39 PM, Adam Kennedy
<adamkennedybac...@gmail.com> wrote:
2009/9/1 David Goehrig <d...@nexttolast.com>:
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.
The problem is as Andreas originally pointed out that there are a
metric ton of SDL_* dlls out there, not all of which are easily found
in a readily accessible form for Windows. There are other issues
with
Perl on Windows, regarding thread support, conflicts between Perl
threads, Windows threads, and SDL threads, but these issues are more
black magic stuff that really should only interest those of us
hacking
the guts of the system.
Alien::SDL doesn't necessarily solve your problem on this front as
what a Windows user / casual developer actually needs is a
click-wrapped installer that provides all of the necessary SDL_* dlls
and does not assume that they have a compiler in place.
The assumption that a Windows Perl developers will have a compiler in
place is entirely reasonable.
Of the two major Perl distributions, Strawberry ships with MinGW out
of the box, and ActivePerl has a simple "ppm MinGW" command to install
it.
In a future release, the MinGW installation will be invisible and
silent under certain conditions, so that ActivePerl will have a
compiler as and when it is needed.
Alien:: is also named the way it is because it's designed to find
external ways to install things, even if they are potentially strange
and unusual.
What if Alien:: itself downloaded and silently /s installed the MSI
package?
Adam K
