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Re: [pygame] pygame source compiling



If you see something I am not understanding, or something I don't know
about the linux way to do things that makes checked in dependencies a
problem, please correct me.

I think the whole idea is ugly to linux users, because we don't have
this problem with the dep's. For _unstable_ libraries it makes a great
deal of sense to include the current working version in the tree, but
for stable ones (and SDL is very stable) it is much easier to have one
central library on the system that gets updated with bugfixes and
stuff. I am sure I have at least 20 programs on my machine which use
SDL, and they all benefit from these upgrades. If there will be a
major new release of SDL, which breaks backwards compability, both the
new and the old version will be maintained for years by the linux
distros.

However, the only truly bad thing about keeping private copies of the
dependencies (that I can think of) is that developers will start to
rely on bugs and undocumented behavior in the dependencies.  It can be
very healthy for some code to be tested against different minor
versions of the same libraries (and different compilers, os etc). Of
course this doesn't have to happen if people take care and update the
in-tree dependencies. Another issue can be that the library versions
that are tested on different platforms get out of sync. This is bad,
obviously..


Ulf