work underway: Dependency on openal incoming

[Maarten Lankhorst]

Hi all,

This message is mostly aimed towards package maintainers, since one of 
the discussions at wineconf last year was that package maintainers would 
like to hear in advance about changing dependencies.

Wine's DirectSound implementation will, in the next release or the 
release after that, rely on OpenAL, the recommended library for linux or 
bsd's is openal-soft, and preferably a recent version, as old versions 
might miss certain experimental extensions that dsound will need. Mac 
users shouldn't need an external openal library, since it has its own 
openal implementation.

Without openal at compile-time, dsound will still build, but report no 
sound devices found. Some games or other applications may refuse to run 
if no dsound devices are found, so its recommended that you build with 
openal. If openal is compiled in, but missing at runtime, dsound.dll 
will refuse to load, which probably means most games will not run either.

Cheers,
Maarten