SDL Library names

SDL Development
1

Hi, I am both a user of SDL and Debian GNU/Linux. I am playing with
packaging SDL for Debian and I have come across a few things that are
quite strange about the SDL library names.

  1. They have caps. Debian packages are not allowed to have caps in the
    package name and I can’t follow the same packagename same lib rule
    proper name in when building the lib.

  2. The .a and .so.* have differing basenames. This also slightly
    complicates building of the package.

My question is why does SDL differ in these ways? I have roughly 300
other libraries installed that seem to follow the all lowercase all same
basename system. Renaming these libraries (libSDL.a and libSDLx11.so)
would break binary compatibility so I choose not to do that for the time
being. Any light you could shed on this note of mine would be appreciated.

Thank you,
eli(another happy sdl user)

2
  1. They have caps. Debian packages are not allowed to have caps in the
    package name and I can’t follow the same packagename same lib rule
    proper name in when building the lib.

Does Debian lower-case the X11 libraries?

m.On Fri, May 21, 1999 at 10:50:28PM -0400, Eli Miller wrote:

–
“How wonderful! How mysterious!
I carry wood! I draw water!”

  • Anonymous Dao poet
3

Ah you are quite right, there are a plethora of caps libs in
/usr/X11R6/lib, in my haste i checked only /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib.
One question answered. Thankyou

eliOn Sat, 22 May 1999, Michael K Vance wrote:

On Fri, May 21, 1999 at 10:50:28PM -0400, Eli Miller wrote:

  1. They have caps. Debian packages are not allowed to have caps in the
    package name and I can’t follow the same packagename same lib rule
    proper name in when building the lib.

Does Debian lower-case the X11 libraries?

m.

–
“How wonderful! How mysterious!
I carry wood! I draw water!”

  • Anonymous Dao poet
4
  1. The .a and .so.* have differing basenames. This also slightly
    complicates building of the package.

My question is why does SDL differ in these ways? I have roughly 300
other libraries installed that seem to follow the all lowercase all same
basename system. Renaming these libraries (libSDL.a and libSDLx11.so)
would break binary compatibility so I choose not to do that for the time
being. Any light you could shed on this note of mine would be appreciated.

This allows you to link with libSDL.a and then the appropriate library
(libSDLx11.so, libSDLggi.so, libSDLalien.so, etc.) will be loaded at
runtime, depending on your environment.
Of course, there’s only the X11 library now, but that may change.

eli(another happy sdl user)

Cool. :slight_smile:

-Sam Lantinga				(slouken at devolution.com)

Lead Programmer, Loki Entertainment Software–
“Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature”
– Rich Kulawiec