You may generate GNU makefiles for building SDL2 and its related test suite by

using the gmake shell script in the Linux/build-scripts folder.

Linux support is currently experimental for the meta-build system. Most of the

progress made on this support happened toward the end of the meta-build system

project, so there is a lot currently missing that could be added in the future.

For the most part, the Linux support works well, but there is a significant

amount of testing needed to verify it can be built in many different

environments.

The Linux project does not target every dependency it should (as seen in the

autotools configure script or in the CMake script), but it does target the

following dependencies:

  -D-Bus (required to build Linux at all)

  -DLOpen (most of the other dependencies are dependent on this)

  -ALSA

  -PulseAudio

  -ESD

  -NAS

  -OSS

  -X11

  -OpenGL

Also, the Linux system should be building the SDL2 library as a shared library,

but it builds it as a static library because of a few premake-related issues.

This is because when the makefile generated by premake tells the linker where to

find the definitions library (libSDL2.o), it also gives a hint to the loader to

find libSDL2.so in the same place, with a relative path. This means in order to

execute the program dynamically linked to SDL2, it's looking in some path like:

  "../../SDL2/Build/Debug"

Now, while this path works at the location of the makefile (such as

./tests/testsprite), it does not make sense from the actual location of the

executable (./tests/testsprite/Build/Debug). Furthermore, it's just massively

inconvenient to have a relative path to look for the shared object. Moving

libSDL2.so into the same directory as the executable does not solve this issue.

Unfortunately, premake also does not allow an install target to be created for

the makefiles, which is another one of the major issues related to building SDL2

as a shared library on Linux. Once these problems are solved, this support

should be very straightforward to add to this system in the future.

The Linux system does have both an automated test and cleaning shell files for

running through the entire supported test suite and cleaning up the generated

and built files, respectively.