Comment 14 for bug 273558

Hi Everyone,

I am the other Linux guy...first, to be clear:

Regardless of what happens with any distro, we (LR) have altered our
OpenAL support to dynamically load either version of libopenal in our
master code - over time all "live" apps will end up supporting either
distro.

Maróy, the next cut of the installer (2.06) should fix this when it
comes out. It is actually a bit silly that the installer links to
libopenal.so.0 at all - this is a result of shared makefiles, not a
design requirement.

Draeath, you ask a good question here: why do we not just patch our apps
(or why are we making so much noise since we already have done the work
for the patch).

In our case there are a few issues:

1. If there really is an ABI change, there is a risk that our change (to
simply load either version of the lib) isn't correct. This is the
practical reason why I keep asking "what changed". (The impractical
reason is my own sense of wonder as a developer of binary apps that the
lib changed.)

2. Since X-Plane 8 is no longer being developed, "change the code" isn't
a very good solution for us. From our perspective as developers of a
binary application that is ported onto Linux, if apps stop working due
to later changes in standard APIs for some distros, it means an
additional cost of development (in that we have to be in "maintenance"
mod for an app for as long as distros are coming out).

(Compatibility problems like this do creep in on Mac/Win, but on a much
slower time scale.)

3. Other distros are making this change...unfortunately the total rate
of change across all distros is very uneven...we first started hearing
about this a while ago and there are still users running the sim who are
on distros that are not making this change (not to mention users who are
not updating their distros). The "shear" of having the change not come
uniformly means we had to do a "dynamic linking" solution - dropping
support for all distros still on libopenal.so.0 was not an option for us.

Thus I reiterate my initial point: openAL is (in theory) a standard -
like OpenGL, it should not be necessary to change the version of the .so
even if the underlying implementation is 100% changed. We link against
ATI and NV implementations of the GL without multiple .so versions,
because the API and ABI are standard. It seems to me that libOpenAL
should be in that category, so there should not be an app-perceivable
change from the creative to the new implementation!

cheers
Ben

Ákos Maróy wrote:
> Thanks for all the swift resposnes.
>
> Ben: while 930 Beta might look for both libraries, the X-Plane Updater
> itself only looks for .0 - so actually updating to 930 Beta is not
> possible without working around this via a symlink, for example
>

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