Bazaar vs Cathedral

[Jastiv]

I think think many members of the open-source community have made a mistake going with the Bazaar development style model vs a Cathedral style model. Basically, I believe the usage of multiple libraries that may or may not be included in a given distribution is a recipe for never getting it compiled. On the other hand, if we would stop relying on other project teams not to mess up the libraries to the point where they are unusable, and just included it as part of the code, we would be able to get a bigger market share with more people working on free software game projects.

[Knitter]

It's a trade, both approaches have their benefits and disadvantages.

If you include the code you'll end up having more than just one project, every library that becomes part of the code becomes a sub-project that you need to maintain, update, fix bugs and do all sort of integration changes. Relying on an external library and compiling against it just makes it easier to develop and focus on one project, the one you really want to develop

Using OS X more than any other operating system makes come in contact with the compilation problem often, but most of the times I just feel that the developers didn't put much effort into making it really cross-platform, not only in the sense of multiple OS but also in the fact that it needs to compile in other computers with the same OS. I spend one afternoon trying to compile Unknown Horizons in GNU Linux (Lubuntu), due to some weirdness of my system nothing worked and I couldn't compile FIFE engine, now I know other devs are working with GNU Linux some even with Debian based distros like mine, but it worked well in their machines and not in mine.

Could they have solved the problem by including the library code? Probably not, it would force them to develop code to handle all the platforms they wish to support and maintain that code updated, I think it would be even harder to make it compile properly.

What I would suggest is that developers stop marketing the project as cross-platform until they have managed to properly test and provide a development kit for other platforms. That and also properly including their dependencies instead of relying in some setup that is only available in certain systems.

But maybe I digress , what I want to point out is not that replying on other libraries instead of including them in code is a bad option, the biggest problem I haver found was that developers assume that other systems are just like theirs and thus if they are able to compile then other should too. I've found that to be a great mistake, special when there is no one that uses different systems to test things properly.

[vexorian]

It is not a "choice by open source developers". As long as the libs are open source, nothing stops them of including the libs with the distribution. I have seen it happen albeit it is probably not very practical as it can increase the size of your package, plus allowing users to use the version of the library that is better-adapted to their system has its benefits.

IMHO, no normal user should ever compile. That's the job of the user's OS distribution, to prepare the packages with the correct dependencies and stuff. If the guys is using a distro without such level of support, then the guy is probably a developer and can go through the issue of compilation.