Building using a pre-existing libtcod installation

[lmartinez-mirror]

Hi, I'm writing up an AUR package for this project since the original Python implementation from libtcod upstream is not as actively maintained as this one.

Is it possible to build this using an existing installation of libtcod? It already exists in the AUR repos; the less redundancy, the better.

[HexDecimal]

It's something I've thought of.

Sometimes a specific revision of libtcod is pinned which can cause issues with using a tagged version instead. Right now it's designed to statically link libtcod so that python-tcod can be developed in parallel with libtcod rather than having to wait for libtcod features to be released. Python's packaging guides have encouraged statically linking libraries like this.

I'd be easier to change the external libraries like zlib so they can be dynamically linked, than to do the same with libtcod.

In general, alternative linking strategies would be added by modifying build_libtcod.py. Dynamically linking libtcod is easy when the revisions match up, and more difficult otherwise. Python-tcod does not use libtcod's stable ABI/API, so any update to libtcod may break python-tcod.