Re: RFS: 0ad

[Philip Taylor <excors@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 5:56 AM, Vincent Cheng <vincentc1208@gmail.com> wrote:
> I didn't come across a FTBFS, but I suppose that was because I built 0 A.D.
> within a pbuilder configured for Testing (which, at the time, had libenet
> 1.2 available). Philip, is upstream planning to port 0ad to a newer version
> of libenet (1.3)?

We're not currently planning to do so.

Porting the code is trivial, but the problem is ENet 1.3 is
protocol-incompatible with 1.2. Cross-platform multiplayer is an
important feature, so we need to use the same ENet series (1.2.* or
1.3.*) for every user on every platform to avoid breakages. (If I
remember correctly, ENet doesn't report the protocol incompatibility
error in a useful way, so we can't even reliably tell the user what's
causing the connection problem.)

About 75% of our Linux users seem to be on Ubuntu. A quarter of those
are using the year-old 10.04 release, and even the not-yet-released
11.04 seems to be stuck with ENet 1.2 packages, so it'll likely be a
couple of years before ENet 1.3 is widely available as a standard
package for nearly all users. I don't want to require all those users
(not to mention users of older versions of other distros) to install
more non-standard packages, since my desire with this whole packaging
thing is to make it easier for users, so I think the least problematic
approach is to require ENet 1.2 everywhere (with newer distros adding
packages for side-by-side installation of 1.2 and 1.3 - several do
that already).

The main alternative I can imagine is to bundle a copy of ENet 1.3
with the game and use that instead of the system library, if the
system library is 1.2. That would let it work automatically and
relatively painlessly for users on older distros, while still using
the system library on newer distros. But bundling isn't nice and I'd
prefer to avoid the added complexity if possible. Unless I'm missing
some better option, adding a new ENet 1.2 package to Debian sounds
best to me.

-- 
Philip Taylor
excors@gmail.com