General Compiling Instructions
 

Well I do have a question and I want some opinions too. I downloaded a game called Boson.(http://boson.sourceforge.net/) In the install it has general compiling instructions. As a software developer you want your software to be usable right? Well what do you tell the end user when the general compiling instructions don't work right yeah we all know,

./configure
make
make install
make clean

what happens when something in make goes wrong? what do you do then, the developers don't include documentation when something goes wrong, they just assume you can figure it out on your own.

Hey if you can get this game to work on your system please tell me I wanna see it.

-Evan

What exactly happened when you tried to compile? I'm assuming you met the software requirements here. I also assume you followed these instructions Can you paste error messages here, one of the resident gurus may be able to help further :D.

Baldrick

well the developers can't say what to do if it goes wrong.... when you're compiling code they can't say which of the 100 core libraries might fail... it's all very generic most of the time.... when i first started using linux and had problems, i would normally open the ./configure script, find the lines that failed, find out what they actually did and recreate it myself and go from there. you can't expect a developer to have to remind to to make sure you have the qt3 headers installed etc... that's not their problem.

Well I got it working, somehow I don't even know. I feel that some software writers should put like a troubleshooting or something like I installed Doom Legacy, I had a wad for it and it kept saying it couldn't find it, I couldn't find where it said to put the wad in any of the FAQs or install guides. I finally figured that one out after a little frustration