[Scummvm-devel] Ports and their custom build systems. Do we need them?

[sunmax at libero.it]

Hi there,

>> Namely that in a port, a supported engine was
>> "overlooked" and "forgotten"

;-)

Since this keeps coming out, let's spread some light.

Couple of engines were left out of the PS2 backend,
-not- because we overlooked and forgot about them,
but because of linker issues when trying to compile
them all in before we leveraged "-fno-exceptions",
"-fno-rtti" from the configure default options.

Before it was triggering the annoying:

 "relocation truncated to fit: R_MIPS_GPREL16"

We could compile one more engine in, by falling back
to "-G0" which disables the $gp optimization and had
some performance drawbacks. So we skipped that.

Note, that even now with "-fno-exceptions -fno-rtti"
you can still not compile SCI altogether with all
the other engines on PS2, and this until we won't
have the plugins in place (leveraging from PSP ;-)
hopefully sometime before Xmas.


>> noticed by chance that the PS2 port didn't enable
>> the Igor engine at all

Igor has been there and enabled for a while on PS2.

"Tinsel" and "Tucker" were left out because of the
reason explained above. They were anyway tested
both in trunk and branches, as my bug reports in
the past shows (eg. "dw2 stuttering on PS2"). And
so was "sci".

I'd say "forgotten" hasn't the right semantic ;-)

The only fault (beside not having enough time yet
to implement the plugins on PS2) was not to commit
earlier a Makefile that listed "Tucker" and "SCI"
too (as disabled), which generated some confusion.

Mea culpa.

The decision of what engines compile in and which
leave out in the past wasn't an easy one, and not
even based on personal taste (i.e. I'm a big fan
of Terry Practhett, yet Tinsel was out...) but on
some feedback received from the small ScummVM PS2
user base. At the end of the day is for them, not
just for ourselves that we keep coding ScummVM.

Ciao,
 -max