[Ohrrpgce] [ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce] Distribute Game fragility; breakage due to gfx_sdl2 becoming default (#1185)

[James Paige]

I wish I had thought out these issues sooner, but I do think that your
plans for mitigating this problems are good. I have a shortage of free time
in the next few weeks, so I can't start on these right away, but I will
help when I can.

I wonder how helpful it would be if I added a PHP file that would dump a
listing of downloads in a more parseable format, rather than trying to
parse the html of an Apache directory listing?

On Fri., Nov. 27, 2020, 1:26 a.m. Ralph Versteegen, <
notifications at github.com> wrote:

> The Distribute Game options are very fragile, and now breaking. (Needs
> fixing before hróðvitnir). They download builds of either the latest stable
> release or latest nightly, and make assumptions about what files are in
> them and what builds they are. This means that when we change anything, it
> breaks all previous versions of the engine! This comes to a point now that
> gfx_sdl2 has become the default on Windows and Linux.
> Wrong version downloaded
>
> The first problem is that they download a different version from what the
> user has, without even a warning. We don't have perfect back-compatibility,
> so we should at least warn. We could upload a .txt file with the name and
> date of the latest release.
>
> But the "player"/"minimal" (warning: inconsistent naming, on Windows
> "minimal" includes Custom) downloads used by the distribmenu are archived
> at http://hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/archive/ anyway, so we *could*
> download the correct stable release instead of the latest one. Or easily
> give people the choice.
>
> For nightlies I think it's acceptable to just download the latest nightly,
> or they could get the next stable release after their current nightly, if
> we had a list of releases in a .txt (or check the archive directory
> listing).
> Build assumptions
>
> For Windows, distribmenu assumes which dlls are in the .zip and need to be
> included.
> get_windows_gameplayer is hardcoded to extract SDL2.dll and
> SDL2_mixer.dll from the zip; find_required_dlls also needs changing.
> write_innosetup_script just includes whichever .dlls were extracted from
> the zip. If we simply change them all to just include all the files in the
> .zip that seems good enough.
>
> For Linux, distribmenu assumes to know what the dependencies for .deb
> files are. (Currently still wrongly set to sdl 1.2.)
> I suggest we put a .txt/ini in the download that lists the current
> dependencies.
> (In future if we include libsdl2.so and libsdl2_mixer.so and package them
> in tarballs (but not .debs) then things change again; can't just include
> all files.)
>
> For Mac distribmenu doesn't assume what the build is, so switching to
> gfx_sdl2 won't break anything, but it does make assumptions about how to
> put an .rpg and .icns inside, which might change some day.
>
> On all platforms, I suggest we put a .txt (or .ini) in the downloads
> containing a "package format version" number and other meta information, so
> old versions of Custom can display "You need to download a more recent
> engine version" if we change anything.
>
> Currently, once hróðvitnir is released, distributing for Windows will
> break in all previous stable releases (when game.exe needs to be
> downloaded). The URL should be changed.
> I fixed this for nightly builds already by uploading
> ohrrpgce-player-win-wip-sdl2.zip instead of ohrrpgce-player-win-wip.zip.
>
> Stable releases download
>
> ohrrpgce-player-win.zip
> ohrrpgce-player-linux-bin-minimal.zip
> ohrrpgce-player-linux-bin-minimal-x86_64.zip
> ohrrpgce-mac-minimal-x86.tar.gz
> ohrrpgce-mac-minimal-x86_64.tar.gz
> from
> http://hamsterrepublic.com/dl/
>
> Nightly releases download
>
> ohrrpgce-player-win-wip-sdl2.zip (previously ohrrpgce-player-win-wip.zip)
> ohrrpgce-player-linux-bin-minimal.zip
> ohrrpgce-player-linux-bin-minimal-x86_64.zip
> ohrrpgce-mac-minimal-x86.tar.gz
> ohrrpgce-mac-minimal-x86_64.tar.gz
> from
> http://hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/nightly/
>
> I suggest we give people the choice of gfx_sdl 32-bit linux builds or
> gfx_sdl2 64-bit linux builds, and put the gfx_sdl2 builds at
> ohrrpgce-player-linux-bin-minimal-x86_64-sdl2.zip, so old releases can
> continue to download gfx_sdl builds from the old URLs and produce correct
> .debs.
> (Or rename both linux zips, to make the naming more consistent at the same
> time!)
> New/Reorganised Distribute Options
>
> Because gfx_sdl2 is Win XP+, we should add an "Export .zip for Obsolete
> Windows" option in the Menu for Win 95+ which packages using a gfx_sdl
> build.
>
> I want to reorganise the menu into two halves: main export options
> (WindowsXP+ zip/installer, 64-bit Mac, 64-bit Linux tarball/deb), and
> options for obsolete OSes (gfx_sdl builds for Windows, 32-bit Mac and
> 32-bit Linux).
>
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