My Big Beef

[pel]

Well, it's not that big.

I just find it annoying that most examples I find in the forum, and on this site no longer work because they were made for old versions of Love. So sad... Makes you realize including love in example packages might be worth it. Especially for the games section.

[zorg]

While i agree on the fact that it is sad that one can't run the older .love files with the newest runtimes, i disagree on the other point;
example sharing, at that moment when a thread's being made, is for the current runtime version (say, love 0.8.x), so most people will already have that, and that will execute the love files without having to bundle the code with it... and that would only work for windows users anyway.

On the other hand, if you are a windows user, you can cheat a bit if you know what you're doing; it is a simple thing in theory, coding it is another story;
Basically, you could write an application (in almost any language really), that would look into the .love files, and in a way, detect which love version it's most likely for, then run it with that.

Easier said than done, but if i'll ever have a reason to code such a thing myself, i will share it.

[pel]

On Mac since '94. Don't know Windows.

It's simply frustrating to download and try examples just to get error messages. Not fun for new Love developers. It's a problem that just gets worse over time.

A versioning system would be nice. Like with Lilypond (musical scoring language), you must write the version of Lilypond your program requires. A simple tag at the beginning. Either in code, or comment in main.lua

Code: Select all

version = "0.0.8"

or

Code: Select all

-- version 0.0.8

A bundle could be made for developers with all versions of Love. For future versions, we could detect versions with the versioning system I described. We could program another way for older versions, like you suggest. Perhaps in bash script. Or another script in between the love call to run the file, and the files to be run. Just a call to decide which version of Love to use.

[slime]

Developers can already specify the version of LÖVE their code is written for in [wiki]love.conf[/wiki] (although it's optional.) If the running version of LÖVE isn't compatible with the specified version, then a warning screen is displayed.

[pel]

OK. That's good to know.

Writing the version should be highly encouraged, if not mandatory.

I'm going to see if I can write a bash script to identify the version of Love needed to run a particular program. My dream is to go to the games page and be able to run all games without a problem.

If that's impossible, perhaps I can write a bash script for the particular files on this site.