Re: Proposing dependencies for gnome-games

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Josef:

> gnome-games has for some time offered online gaming capabilities on top of the 
> GGZ Gaming Zone platform. Three games are already working fine, a fourth one 
> is currently being ported. As an upstream author of GGZ I'm very pleased to 
> see this.
>
> However, gnome-games includes internal copies of all GGZ libraries in its SVN, 
> with the justification of wanting to have GGZ support even if the distro in 
> question doesn't have GGZ packages yet. Recently, a member of the Debian 
> security team got very upset about this as this requires patching more 
> packages.
> I share these concerns, especially since there are no major distros left that 
> do not include recent GGZ packages.

Sorry for the late response, but not quite true.  Solaris is a major
distro that doesn't include GGZ packages.

Solaris has never included GGZ.  Perhaps in the future we will include
GGZ, but I am not aware of any specific plans to add it in the
short-term.  If gnome-games starts to depend on it, then we will need to
consider adding it.  Not sure how long that will take.

> I was pointed out that in order to let gnome-games' configure script fail when 
> no external GGZ libraries are found, I would need to propose those libraries 
> as external dependencies on this list.

Why is it necessary for gnome-games configure to fail if GGZ is not
found?   If configure doesn't find GGZ, why not just disable building
whatever games have hard dependencies on GGZ?  Or do all the games now
depend on GGZ?

Brian