Re: Libraries (was Re: [glob2-devel] Glob2 salvage proposal)

[Martin Voelkle]

 

One good example is that I'm trying out libboost-filesystem for use in a
few places.  Boost (www.boost.org) is a large collection of well-written
C++ libraries, and the filesystem library allows me to (for example)
iterate over a directory as if it were a standard container.  In the
long-term, I would be very tempted to use this library all over the
code.  How objectionable is this idea, and where should I make a note of
it if it's acceptable?

One way that this does relate to the salvage proposal is rewriting the
interface in QT.  Presumably this means getting rid of SDL for graphics,
but what about the rest of SDL?  Would we want to get rid of SDL
entirely?  If so, does anyone know of another platform-independent
networking library?  I had been looking at socket++
(http://www.linuxhacker.at/socketxx), but I'm now starting to think we'd
need a lower-level API to do the work we want to do.

QT 4 does much more thant graphics: it does also gui, networking, filesystem and much more.
Only its sound support is almost inexistent. For this, we could go
GStreamer (c++ bindings of course) or OpenAL. OpenAL is used by popular
games like UT2004 (UT2003 too?). GStreamer seems more versatile
(standard plugins handle many audio formats like ogg and speex, which
reduces audio dependencies to 1), more used (in free software), but
less oriented towards games (it probably lacks 3D audio).

Maybe there are OpenAL plugins for GStreamer? This would be really
nice, because GStreamer's plumbing is great to handle dynamic
composition of multiple sources. Using speex and ogg libraries with
OpenAL directly would require us to write the plumbing (which is
already there using SDL audio, but dropping more code is always good
IMHO).

Martin