Re: libmikmod woes..

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

[To the PPlay people reading this: This is a reply to one of the first
messages of a BIG thread on the LGDC mailing list.]

Steve Baker wrote:

>> Why should everyone code his own library?

>The shame of all this is that there was/is an effort to build one
>STANDARD game library (The Linux GSDK project) - I joined that at
>the outset - but they wasted so much time discussing and discussing
>what should be done that I gave up working with them and went my
>own way.  That was about 3 years ago - and they *still* don't have
>anything like a usable and reasonably complete game library...I have

I plead guilty.
PenguinPlay (aka the Linux GSDK project) has produced only very little up
to now, and nothing that's useful. To a big part that's my fault. But we
(speaking for PPlay now) have realized this and now the PenguinPlay as you
know it is officially dead.

But as giving up is too easy - and plain wrong - there's now a new
PenguinPlay. Same basic goal (creating/defining a standard game SDK), but
completely different means of archieving it. I hope I can have the proper
new homepage up until this evening.

Steve (I knew I knew you...), can you help with it? I mean, not the "Uh, we
have a plan, can you do the work please" thing, but can you have a look at
PenguinPlay from time to time and give me a slap when you think it's
progressing too slowly, when there's too much talking again, and too little
action? And if I then come up with some stupid excuse, slap again twice as
hard?

Sorry for not including more info right now. But this time I want to first
do (some of) the work (building the homepage in this case) and *then*
make big words...

>So, I guess more games SDK's will be written, each one will get a
>couple of games written for it and then fall from grace.

Quite early in my holiday I realized that I had left some important thing
at home - a good (literary) book for relaxing reading. But fortunately I
had my collection of news items / features / papers about Linux / Open
Source with me and so I ended up reading much of this stuff again.

Among it were some articles about the waste of developer resources because
everyone is starting Yet Another IRC Client etc instead of helping with the
bigger projects. Those articles were always heavily discussed and people
always came to the conclusion that this was a good thing. 
Free Software is in part so successful because many people start their own
little project and through that get good experience for successfully
contributing to the bigger ones later, because many concurrent IRC Clients
and game libraries are developed and natural selection lets only the best
succeed. Evolution in action.

Not too long ago I wanted to concentrate all linux game library dev efforts
into one or two big projects. That undertaking completely failed, and the
different SDKs are still doing their own thing. However, it created a
dicussion of how SDK developers could better stay in contact with each
other, to be able to better borrow ideas and code and to improve
interoperability of their SDKs. As a result of this discussion the LGDC was
created.
It didn't develop in this direction but instead it's now focused on helping
game developers, but perhaps that's a good thing too (fitting two agendas
under one roof is problematic).

So now i'll give it another try with the new PenguinPlay.

>I don't know how to break out of that cycle...even though I confess
>to being a part of it.

One nice thing with free software is that even if your project finally
fails you can come out as winner.
Besides that you know that rule in software development: "Plan to throw one
away, you will have to do so anyway". Perhaps that also holds for entire
projects...


	Christian

PS: It will take some time until I really manage to catch up with this
thread ;)
Thanks for starting it.

--

Drive A: not responding...Formatting C: instead