Wiki, installation instructions and library dependencies.

[shirish]

Hi all,
Newbie here. While I'm downloading the unstable snapshot of allacrost , I am a tad disappointed with the installation instructions given in the wiki both at :-

http://allacrost.sourceforge.net/wiki/i ... Repository

as well as

http://allacrost.sourceforge.net/wiki/i ... pendencies

The problem is for a casual user/newbie he might not know what dependencies are needed. For instance you have given libsdl as one of your requirements, but libsdl does not have a metapackage atleast in/on debian unstable. Its broken into many compartments. The same goes for boost and some of the other stuff.

Just to take that e.g. forward if I just look at libsdl then there are/maybe 5 packages that would be needed :-

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libsdl-gfx1.2-4 libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-mixer1.2 libsdl-sound1.2 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 and  libsdl1.2debian

Just using code to highlight. Anyways, the point is even then I'm not sure whether I would need the -dev packages of these packages for compilation or not.

For opengl it would again be three packages :-

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libgl1-mesa-glx , libglu1-mesa and perhaps python-opengl

It would have been nice if the library dependencies page could also have something like this (atleast for deb-based distributions)

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sudo apt-get install libsdl-gfx1.2.4 libsdl-image1.2 libsdl-mixer1.2 libsdl-sound1.2 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 and  libsdl1.2debian

or whatever people would find in the stable releases of the OS. It would make things much easier than trying out things and looking at what stopped autoconf to compile the project/game.

Just my 2 paise.

Nice to see some activity though, have been keeping on you guys.

[Roots]

Where the wiki says "SDL", it means the core SDL library (libsdl1.2debian in your case). You don't need those additional SDL libraries (except for SDL-ttf, which the wiki does list I believe), but there's no harm in installing them.


And yes, of course the -dev packages are needed for compilation. For libraries there are typically two packages for each one: the run-time library and the development library. You have to have the development library if you intend to compile code that uses that library. This isn't an Allacrost-specific issue....this is something that someone who compiles things should know in the first place. I don't think its our responsibility to teach the basics of source compilation for everyone out there on who knows how many operating systems.


I agree that it would be nice to have a single apt-get line for Debian users, but that line may only work for the latest stable. And Ubuntu's latest version will likely need another apt-get line. And if those package names are ever renamed or removed, how can we keep on top of that? That's why we list the formal names of the libraries that you need, so that you can look them up and install them yourself for however your system manages/installs library packages. Be thankful that autoconf even tells you what's missing at all, as some projects I know don't even do that, and will just quit if you don't have what they need during build.


Also keep in mind that this recent release was a development release. When the official release happens, we will (hopefully) have packages for Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, SuSe, etc. all ready to go so you won't need to worry about compiling from scratch. I appreciate the feedback though.