[Gambas-devel] Component Miscellaneous

[Rob]

On Saturday 27 September 2003 13:03, daniel wrote:
> > I was just thinking, once there's an SDL component,
> > including it in the base Gambas package means Gambas then
> > requires SDL,
>
> Well, Gambas does not need SDL, you have options in
> "configure" script to disable SDL, or any other component
> dependences, for example, when I compile Gambas, i use
> --disable-mysql-driver and --disable-pgsql-driver as I do not
> have that devel libraries installed.

Let me rephrase that.

If you include an SDL component in the base Gambas package, then 
for the 90% of the people out there who will be just installing 
Gambas out of a binary package to run some app, they will need 
to have SDL installed.  People installing my Mandrake binary 
packages of Gambas need mysql and postgres both installed.  To 
the bulk of Gambas' audience (ex-Windows people) there is no 
such thing as "compiling a program", so Gambas requires whatever 
was installed on the person's machine who built it, and if 
something wasn't installed, Gambas (as experienced by the end 
user) does not support that feature.

I know a lot of you guys on the list are tarball bigots, but here 
you are on a list making it easier for Windows/VB programmers to 
develop Linux apps, so you have to understand that ultimately 
most end users are not going to be compiling Gambas or Gambas 
apps from source. :)

>  Distributing binaries packages is also possible, as
> components are libraries, but it has the same problem as other
> binary distributions: differences between gcc versions, c++
> link issues,etc

Well, if you build an RPM of something, and it's installed on a 
copy of your operating system where the user never knew enough 
to build a new copy of gcc from source (outside the RPM system), 
etc, you'll simply never run into those problems.  Same for 
Debian packages.  Distributions like Lindows and Xandros don't 
even ship a compiler...

So, back to my original question.  Are gambas components like 
shared libraries/OCX's (drop them in a directory, do the 
equivalent of ldconfig/regsvr32 and gambas makes use of them) or 
does the whole source tree need to be recompiled if you just 
want to add a component?

Rob