sound distribution practices

[Moritz Lenz]

On 04/09/2012 09:10 PM, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 08:42:21PM +0200, Moritz Lenz wrote:
>> On 04/08/2012 06:53 PM, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
>> > On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 11:09:30AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>> >> On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 03:23:26PM +0200, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
>> >> > On Sat, Apr 07, 2012 at 09:08:21PM -0400, Andrew Whitworth wrote: 
>> >> > Btw, this also applies to NQP bundling full source of
>> >> > libtommath and dyncall.
>> >> 
>> >> We'll work on removing the libtomath and dyncall sources from NQP 
>> >> tarballs, or make it very easy for NQP to ignore those sources.
>> > 
>> > Thanks. As far as I'm concerned something simple as a Configure.pl option (say,
>> > --use-system-libraries) or an environment variable would do
>> 
>> Unfortunately from our point of view it's not that simple, because we
>> have some patches to those libs; we'll try to push them upstream, but
>> it'll take some time to do that and to get them all accepted.
> 
> What kind of patches?

For dyncall mostly build fixes for cygwin and windows.
For libtommath a few additional features: conversion from and to double
precision floats, and extraction of machine-size integers.

One of the libtommath developers has expressed mild interest in the
float conversion routines, I just have to polish them to the standard of
the upstream maintainers.

> We may try to get those included in the Debian packages
> for the two libraries if they are not too "excessive".
> 
> Also, I was wondering why did you choose libtommath and dynacall, instead of,
> say, GMP and FFI? (I'm just curious).

Because both GMP and FFI are both quite hard to build on Windows.
Yes, I know, Debian maintainers usually don't worry about that :-), but
we need to consider a big part of our potential user base.