Regarding the whole "addition of libs" discussion: IMO it is a good idea from the design point to not reinvent the wheel for basically everything. If there is a good and well maintained library, we should use it. Yes, too many libs are bad, but if there are some good ones, we really should be using these, as longs as they are rather standard (and boost does meet this cireteria as libzip does). So IMO the general guideline for the future should be there: 1) Keep the dependences low, but... 2) When there is a well maintained and proven good lib that does take some load away from the Wesnoth devs, use it. 3) That very lib should be usable on all the main platforms at least, if possible on all really supported ones. (It should *at least* work on Linux, MacOSX and Windows, we can't take all into account though everyone more supported will be good, especially the amigaos guys, since they *do* submit patches to make it work)
The last point is definatly the least significant one. Do you remember the discussions we had about adding an OpenGL backend? If we had done this (there were *many* reasons speaking in favor of it) we would have closed out quite many users due to a lack of good hardware and a good opengl driver. These build dependencies are IMO not this critical and if they really help the project we should use them. Of course we should not behave like "wow, a new lib to depend on, lets use it..." but asking the question if it really does help us and will be a nice support definatly is valid. If we come to such a conclusion, we should go for the lib. I hope you can agree with such a policy. If you ahve further additions, please post them. On the matter of boost: Concluding from what I heard in IRC it is *really* helpfull and could be used at several places for the game, the first being filesystem actions (that are a real PITA to have platform independend). The only thing to ask is: do we have someone able to do the configure/autotools magic? Can we ask the boost guys if we need help with implementing the autotools stuff if we are not able ourself? (IMO autotools are a real monster...) Any opinions on this are welcome. Cheers, Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
