[Openal] Linux deployment and OpenAL-Soft

[Carsten Fuchs]

Jason, Chris and Daniel,
thank you very much for your quick replies!  :-)

I managed to make OpenAL-Soft work without problems, linking dynamically to ALSA (thanks for the 
hint!). My old Debian Sarge system only installed an old CMake version (2.0) though, so I wrote some 
custom SConstruct/SConscript files for building.

About shipping the (Windows-) DLLs in the local directory of the app: Yes, I'm aware of the issues 
with DLL search order and related upgrading issues, but as I currently ship no executable installer 
and am fully prepared to update my release package whenever new versions of OpenAL become available, 
this seems to be the best solution for me right now, or at least until I eventually employ an 
executable installer.

If I understood Daniels post correctly, the OpenAL32.dll search for OpenAL components is independent 
from the search (and search order) in which Windows searches for DLLs when an app starts.
That means that native OpenAL implementations are found (and eventually used) even in the bad case 
where my app-local OpenAL DLLs are older than the system ones. So either way, the users native 
driver implementation (if present) will be used in all cases, so that in summary, even though not 
optimal, the situation with shipping app-local DLLs is pretty relaxed. (Only if there is no native 
implementation and the older app-local DLLs have a bug that the system DLLs don't have is there a 
real disadvantage.)

Anyways, thanks for all your help!  :-)

Best regards,
Carsten



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