Sun 2003-02-16 10:40, Tobias Ernst (2:2476/418.15) wrote to andrew clarke:

 ac>> Have any of the SMAPI developers looked at XMSGAPI and 
 ac>> considered using it instead of SMAPI?

 > Perhaps you'd like to explain in short what the main advantages of such 
 > a step would be? I understand that having two concurring msgapi's might 
 > impove development due to concurrency effects, but what was your 
 > personal motivation to start developing a second msgapi?

I wanted to make a lot of changes in a short time and didn't want to
interrupt the work being done on SMAPI, or get involved in the politics of
some of the "design decisions" that I made, eg. it was clear that
nobody the sizeof(XMSG) issue solved for all compilers, so I did that.

 ac>> Also, can the Husky developers please stop using #include 
 ac>> ?  Instead use #include  and cc 

 > No. We were at #include  and were forced to change it, as 
 > some of the names SMAPI used for header files clashed with files 
 > already installed in /usr/local/include by different open source 
 > packages.

It probably would've been easier to reduce the number of header files
used by SMAPI.  All you should need is #include .  This is
what I've been working towards in XMSGAPI.

 ac>> -I , where  is where header.h is
located.  Otherwise 
 ac>> you MUST have a directory named smapi, which can especially be a 
 ac>> problem on non-UNIX machines, particularly because you can't use 
 ac>> a symlink to the real SMAPI (which might be XMSGAPI).

 > I can't see why this would be a problem on non-UNIX machines. Just 
 > install XMSGAPI (or only the headers, if you wish) into a directory 
 > called smapi. What's the problem?

It creates problems when you're testing the behaviour of different
versions, because they can't all be in a directory named smapi.  So
you have to use symlinks or mess around renaming directories.

I realise this isn't a huge problem though.

 > I think this inconvenience is rather low as compared to the big 
 > inconvienience you would have when SMAPI would overwrite existing 
 > header files when being installed on UNIX,

How would it do that?

 > or mysterious compile errors when the wrong header file is attracted.
 > Most major UNIX packages (kde, gnome, ...), i.E. all that install
 > more than one or two header files (and smapi, unfortunately, installs
 > half a dozen, we never got this sorted out) use this approach nowadays.

Just use msgapi.h.

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--- Msged/BSD 6.1.1