[Openal-devel] Some patches used in Debian openal-soft package

[Andres Mejia]

On Sunday 17 May 2009 06:12:23 Chris Robinson wrote:
> Hi Andres.
>
> Out of curiosity, how many unmaintained projects are there that require
> openal-config, and can't be patched by distros to use pkg-config instead?
> IIRC, the old OpenAL also used pkg-config, so using that should still work
> fine for both the old and new library.
>
> Honestly, I find all the non-centralized *-config scripts to be really
> messy, and the less temptation for people to use them, the better, IMO. At
> least pkg- config keeps it all tidy and works through an established
> interface for all packages, whereas separate *-config scripts sometimes
> have "unique" options and behaviors, making things more confusing in the
> end.
>
> That is, unless someone can convince me otherwise. But the maintenance cost
> and usability of such a script, especially when a pkg-config script is
> already available, doesn't seem worth it to me.

I don't have any opinion on the use of such a script. I will drop that from the 
Debian packages.

> > The first patch (install-alsoft.conf.patch) is used to optionally install
> > alsoftrc.sample as a configuration file in /etc/openal/alsoft.conf. It is
> > optional and must be set so that someone who may be building and
> > installing the openal- soft libraries directly from a source tarball
> > don't get their alsoft.conf file overwritten unintentionally.
>
> Perhaps it would be better to install it as alsoft.conf.example, or
> something. The given alsoftrc.sample isn't intended to be used as a
> "default" configuration file, but to show and explain how to use the
> various options.

Something I see done in such a case is to either have everything commented out 
or set the options to the default that would be used by a program anyway. I see 
the configuration file is already written with the latter approach in mind. The 
configuration file is then installed in the location the program would read for 
system wide settings, under /etc/*. It's then up to the user to modify the 
configuration file.

The configuration file may certainly be renamed as alsoft.conf.example, but it 
means a user has to move the file and then edit the file, as opposed to just 
editing the file. This is something I think is unnecessary as alsoft.conf has the 
default options enabled anyway.

> > The fifth patch is used to allow Debian packages to build the static
> > library. I'm not sure if this is necessary still. In any case, it applies
> > after applying all other patches.
>
> I've been vocal about this before, but I still do not think it's wise to
> build/install a static lib of OpenAL on systems that can use dynamic libs.

In this case, I'll drop the last patch and building of static libs in the Debian 
package as you did supply the ability to create static libs via -DLIBTYPE=STATIC 
(I didn't see that before). I suppose anyone wanting the static libs could just 
grab the source and build it themselves.

-- 
Regards,
Andres