Re: Perl roguelike coming along

Jeff Lait wrote: 
Radomir 'The Sheep' Dopieralski wrote:

At Mon, 29 Aug 2005 22:06:20 -0500,
Timothy Pruett wrote:


copx wrote:

"Radomir 'The Sheep' Dopieralski" <thesheep@ sheep.prv.pl> schrieb im
Newsbeitrag news:slrndh6kb2.32t.thesheep@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[snip]


Personally, I woudn't install a binary release on my box unless it came

from a source I'm sure of. 


Why? Security? If that's the case I can only say: How irrational of you.
If you don't actually read and understand the entire source code of  a
program before you run it (how realistic is that?) the chance that you might
run malware is just as high as with binary releases.


That's exactly what I was thinking.  It'd be so easy to hide some
malicious code in some obscure function, and the chances of catching
it are slim to none.  Especially if the coder was smart, and gave all
malicious code phony variable names, that sound like legit ones.


You can do it only once.
And nobody compiles and runs things as root.
On the other hand, most binary 'installers' need root priviledges.



I don't think there is any reason why a roguelike binary needs to be
installed as root.  Or even installed at all.

Well, if it needs to install libraries. Although, admittedly, most RLs don't need to, since most RLs only depend on curses, which any *nix distro is going to have. Mine will require more library installation, though, since I need to install SDL, SDL_mixer, and Lua.

A roguelike should be able to be unpacked to a user directory and run
directly from there with no actual setup required.

Yes, ideally, it should be done this way, when possible. That's one of the reasons I love ADoM; I can just unpack into my ADOM directory, and I'm ready to go.

I'd like there to be more of a tendency to Linux binary distributions.
Maybe then the powers that be will become less cavalier about breaking
the binary compatibility.  One thing Microsoft has got right is the
ability for a package built on one version to mostly run on all the
later versions.

What? On my work computer, which runs Windows XP, I frequently browse through "Home of the Underdogs", and other such sites, looking for fun, time-killing games. I can easily go through a half dozen games, however, before I get to one that works on a modern Windows machine. So much for Microsoft's supposed "backwards compatibility". Apps built for DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, hell, even Windows NT are not guaranteed to work at all on Windows XP. Even adjusting the "compatibility" settings doesn't help most of the time.

Anyways, I personally hate to install from source.  There's this
ridiculous notion that most *nix coders have, that apparently binaries
aren't necessary.  Which is, of course, complete BS.  I *hate*
compiling programs I download, because 50% of the time, it doesn't
compile.  Pain in the ass.  Everyone should provide binaries with
their apps.


I personally hate to install binaries, they go int strange places and
act funny 50% of the time -- because they barely compiled.
Everyone should make sure their sources compile without problems.



A great way to make sure the source compiles is to actually compile it.
 Having compiled it, why not distribute the binary as well?

Exactly. Distributing just the source will make some people unhappy. Distributing the source *and* the binary will make everyone happy. I can't think of any valid reason to not just go ahead and give both options, especially since your users will appreciate it greatly.

This isn't an argument not to distribute source.  Indeed, if you are
distributing source, I would recomend not giving the option of only
downloading the binary.  Require all users to download the source as
well, that way in 15 years they'll still be able to rebuild it.

Yeah. That would, in my opinion, be the best possible solution to the problem.


--
My projects are currently on hold, but I do have
some junk at the site below.

http://www.freewebs.com/timsrl/index.htm

--
.

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