shirish {l Wrote}:It would be nice to have at least the basics of what is needed to compile and run the game in any linux distribution. For example if there is a makefile, there should be a configure.ac or/and configure.in file which does all the checks and figures out if the dependencies are missing. Another could be to change the build system to cmake which gives IMHO a better chance for testers or/and developers to find out what is going wrong when compiling the app. and share the same with others. The output while using cmake is much more ordered then with a simple Makefile.
Another thing would be to have a changelog file which basically takes all the git commit ids and shares it in the changelog, bonus points if git commit ids are mentioned, even more bonus points if dates are there in the changelog file.
Look forward to compile and play the sample game on my low-end desktops and lappies.
As a user, autoconf is great. I get a program, run configure, and run make. As a developer, I hate that program. I just find it hard to setup. It provided a lot of benefit during the unix wars to find the correct includes for each unix but I find the complexity not worth it to me. I wanted to use cmake a while ago but I need a windows build. At the time mingw32-cmake existed on Fedora but I couldn't make it work with SDL. I tried again just recently and got it work so it is quite possible Bt Builder will switch to it. I've already converted SDL_mng to use it. I will say I still don't like cmake. Something about the syntax doesn't appeal to me but it seems to be the best option for my needs. I will also see if I can add a more detail install information to the documentation.
I'm not certain about an automatic changelog file. I feel there is value in having a high level changelog which is provided by the news.html file. Yes if you had one with commit IDs you could easily look things up in git but if you are going to do that wouldn't you already have cloned the repository and could just look at the log directly. For example I have a checkin which fixes resizing maps. That wouldn't be included in my manual changelog because no release had it broken.
Hopefully you won't be too disappointed at the incomplete sample game. I think it still needs a lot of work before it is fun to play and have a complete story.