[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] libt4k_common update

[Brendan Luchen]

Hi all,

Just a quick update--preliminary work on the commonification branch on
both TuxMath and TuxType are winding down (finally!) with just a few
minor kinks to work out. The biggest is probably moving to gettext
0.18 (make install is still running!) and ensuring that nothing is
broken. I hope to have more exciting news in a day or two ;)

One question I'd like to bring up in the meantime is how to handle the
(rather unlikely?) situation where a user wants to build with a
"canned" version of t4k_common but doesn't have RSVG/SDLPango
available. This will (and should) presently fail with unresolved
linkage. libt4k_common can support usage of SDL_ttf or PNG, but I'm
not sure how easy/possible it is to compile the shared library with
those flexible dependencies. In essence, we'd be shifting the
conditional compilation of the backend in functions like LoadImage
(which prefers, but doesn't need, RSVG) from t4k_common compile time
to tuxtype compile-time. Worth it? Probably not, but part of me thinks
it would be fun to try.

Best,
Brendan