litt' rant

[artaxerxes]

To the Exult Dev Team:

You know guys how much I love your work. I've been a faithful watcher of and participant in the development of Exult, even at the times of Jackchaos (I still wonder what happened to them).

But yesterday, I swear I would have thrown at you a mass death spell if I could. Let me explain.

I just installed my new distro, Mandrake 8.2, since I wanted to be up to date and to be able to sync with my Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 without having through the hassle of patching the kernel. Once that was done, I wanted to play a bit of Ultima just to relax myself. Since I didn't keep the compiled version of exult, I just CVSed in the repository, checked out exult and started the ./autogen.sh galore.

That's where the first pb started. I didn't install the libSDL-devel packages. Mistake on my part, true, but incredibly difficult to detect since no clear error messages was issued, just a AM_SDL_PATH error.
A quick look at config.log helped me understand what happened and it got corrected quite rapidly.

However, in order to compile the CVS exult, you've got to install SDL_mixer-1.2.4, that even my distro didn't have on its cooker pot. I had to literaly scavenge the web to find a SDL_mixer rpm that would work and of course, being RPM, dependencies started to hit. I had now to guess where the libasound.so file came from as well as stdc++.1.4. Back to scavenging the web for appropriate packages. I felt I still was in control, so I wasn't _THAT_ pissed.

Now, with SDL_mixer-1.2.4 handy, I went back to my ./configure, and you know what?, it failed. Timidity refused to play nice so I had to disable it. I re-run ./configure and again it failed. I have a gut feeling I have to also install SDL-1.2.4 and I'm back scavenging. THEN I really was pissed off.

Wouldn't it be easy to have the ability to checkout "exult-development" if we want the latest and greatest, but to checkout "exult" to get the stable and able?

At the end of all that (it was already 1.00 am), I just turned the thing off and went to bed.

Please you exult dev team, do something about it. Not only I can't use exult at home now, but I can't test the progress of si-french.

Also, just know I would have used my hourglass of fate once the mass death spell would have been cast.

A long-time friend,
Artaxerxes

[wjp]

Sorry about that...

> Wouldn't it be easy to have the ability to checkout "exult-development"
> if we want the latest and greatest, but to checkout "exult" to get the stable and able?

You can already do this, but the 'stable' branch is called devel-1-00 in CVS, while the 'unstable' one is the MAIN branch.

You can convert your current local CVS repository to the 'stable' one by running

cvs -z3 update -d -r devel-1-00

[nadir]

Artaxerxes don't blame us for your distribution's broken package management.
If you use Exult's CVS you do so at your own risk. It means you have to follow the mailing list and the cvs commit logs where such things as tagging and branching of the tree are discussed

[wjp]

Other things:

yes, SDL_mixer 1.2.4 need SDL 1.2.4

Also, www.rpmfind.net is great for finding which package a library belongs to.
(That, or rpm -qf , if you already have a file but the version is too old)

[Darke]

Coincidentally enough, I just installed sdl-mixer 1.2.4 yesterday,
myself. (Yeah, I've not had a compilable exult for what, two months?
*grin* The tools seem to compile fine though...) And I had to *gasp!*
actually make the 'package' myself and submit it to my distro's
package/bug tracker for inclusion in the main tree. There's always
another option. *grin*

But yes, it's a _very_ good idea to subscribe to and pay attention to the
exult-general list if you're going to be messing with the cvs. (It's low
volume, so you don't need to worry about it taking up too much of your
time.) Making sure to read and stay up to date on the ChangeLog too is
always a good idea.

Darke
(Who believes that rpms/srpms tend to be an evil you unfortunately
need to live with. He prefers source tarballs though. *grin*)

[SB-X]

/me uses precompiled tarballs - aka slackware packages

[fliptw]

yes, in order to use linux, one must RTFM.

[Dominus]

RTFM - what's that?

Dominus - who never reads manuals just as everyone else

[wjp]

RTFM is something a bit like RTFF

[IgnitusDragonn]

Read the fucking forum? Sorry, couldn't help contributing.

[artaxerxes]

read the friendly FAQ

[IgnitusDragonn]

So RTFM is read the friendly manual?
Weird, Ive never read any manual that was "friendly"...

[SnowyThing]

All manuals are..... are clunky and full of big words like... "Don't" and "Warning".

[IgnitusDragonn]

and "you might really screw up so its not our fault just because you were reading what we wrote and followed our directions..."

[SB-X]

Japanese manuals are pretty friendly.

[SnowyThing]

Japanese manuals.... are stereotypically full of screaming.

[IgnitusDragonn]

...and have tons of anime porn in them...

[wjp]

That's "hentai", not "anime porn"

[IgnitusDragonn]

You'd know.

[wjp]

lol

[SnowyThing]

I think we've found Wjp's dark dark hobby.

"Wjb, that is not virtuous!"

[wjp]

Hehe, my 'dark' hobby is just anime. Not hentai

[SnowyThing]

Pokemon, eh? That's even darker. Lord British will hear of this!