Proposal: Package The Loki Compatibility Libraries

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 03/23/2010 03:25 PM, Hamish Wilson wrote:
> Dear Fedora Gaming Special Interest Group,
> 
> 
> I salute your efforts to make Fedora one of the best Linux systems for
> gaming. I have had an idea to make your support even better: package the
> Loki Compatibility Libraries. Granted this would only help users in
> running commercial games, such as the Loki Software and Hyperion game
> ports, but the libraries themselves are not proprietary and are simply
> older versions of free libraries that are needed by these ports to run
> repackaged. Case in point, on SuperGamer it appears to include these
> libraries by default. The Loki port of Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns runs
> beautifully out of the box, as does Hyperion's port of SiN. I have been
> fighting to get these to work on Fedora with very little success. I am
> not quite sure how SuperGamer packages them, but I would love to be able
> to type into my root terminal, say, "yum install loki-compat-libs" and
> suddenly have these games work. I would be very happy if someone looks
> into this.

Wow. I understand the motivation here, but do we really want to keep
dragging these ancient libraries around for proprietary games? This is a
security nightmare just waiting to happen, not to mention encouraging
other code projects to simply depend on loki-compat-libs rather than
fixing their code to work with the modern versions of these libraries.

I'd much rather lobby the vendors for these games to open source their
codebases so that we could fix them up and include them properly.

~spot