[Openal-devel] alsa backend on newer distro without libasound.so

[Michael Zeilfelder]

I'm a little at loss of how to fix a certain problem. 

In short the problem is that alc_backend_alsa.c does try to open (with 
alDLOpen_)  libasound.so which is not available on some newer distributions 
which only have libasound.so.2

It could be fixed either by me by also checking for libasound.so.2 in 
alc_backend_alsa.c or it could be fixed by my users by creating a link from 
libasound.so.2 to libasound.so.

Does someone know if there is a problem with checking for libasound.so.2 or is 
that library not downward compatible and I will even run in more problems as 
a result? Also if I fix it that way, this means basically that I'm guaranteed 
to run in the same problem again in some years (.so.3 will happen someday) 
and I do already know that my game will no longer run in the future :(

For some reasons the OpenAL libraries delivered on those distributions do 
already work. Did they fix this? I don't know...

In case you are wondering why i don't use the OpenAL libraries which are 
already on those systems, those are the reasons:
- Because of a problem with libopenal.so.0 (we had irregular rustle noises) I 
switched to libopenal.so.1 which fixed the problem, but libopenal.so.1 is 
still not available for many distributions
- I preferred using own shared libraries instead of system libraries anyway, 
because this way the risk of the game no longer working when system libraries 
are updated is reduced.

- Michael