Games on Linux

[Alan Evans]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Reindl Harald wrote:
> Am 25.10.2012 01:09, schrieb Alan Evans:
>> Apple is essentially single-platform and Microsoft at least tries to
>> keep things backward-compatible. The Linux kernel devs seem, at least
>> to the uninitiated, to have some kind of animosity to the very idea of
>> ABI compatibility.
>>
>> Witness VMWare basically recompiling itself every time the user
>> updates his kernel. No game developer wants that kind of headache

You seem to have missed my mea culpa about using the kernel as an
example, but...

> you can not compare KERNEL modules with userland software

I can if userland suffers from the same kind of problems, which was my point.

"Failed to load application foo because library bar-1.12.5.0 was not
found." Checking my libs directory, I see that I have bar-1.12.5.7. So
I make a symbolic link and hope for the best, but no: Program foo now
segfaults because the libbar devs changed some function prototype. And
it was doomed to fail anyway because my distro ships libbar with
CONFIG_GARBUNDING_GRABULATORS=off when it was compiled.

> VMware itself does NOT recompile itself
> simply because it is a binary
> only the kernel-modules are source

I didn't say that it recompiled *all* of itself.