Bug#701561: Please test ioquake3 on PowerPC, particularly without Altivec

[Simon McVittie]

On 04/06/13 15:37, thinkbrown at gmail.com wrote:
> I did some tinkering with runtime detection when I was working on
> getting PPC64 support under Quake II, so I'll see if I can make
> something work. Maybe  *ppcaltivec.so, *ppc.so, and *ppc64.so

The reason I suggested that *ppc.so should be the Altivec flavour (if
there's a separate non-Altivec flavour) is that these suffixes are used
by upstream; they're a plugin ABI of sorts. There's a rather awkward
correspondence between the build system (which, upstream, derives them
from uname(1)) and q_platform.h (which derives them from cpp's built-in
preprocessor definitions), which need to stay in sync.

Upstream always build *ppc.so with Altivec, so if we introduce a new
one, I'd be inclined to keep that suffix for the setup they support, and
introduce the Debian-specific one for the setup they don't. 64-bit
PowerPC is already *ppc64.so upstream.

Upstream also have a different per-architecture name for the executables
(e.g. ioquake3.ppc, ioquake3.x86, ioq3ded.ppc) - in Debian we rename
them to just "ioquake3" and "ioq3ded", so that wrapper shell scripts for
particular games don't need to know the right magic suffix.

In Debian we use the dpkg architecture instead of uname(1), then
post-process it to get the same answer (/usr/share/ioquake3/q3arch).

    S