Proposing dependencies for gnome-games

[Josef Spillner <spillner kde org>]

Hello,

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.

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.
So here I am. The proposal encompasses libggzmod and libggzcore for the client 
applications as well as libggzdmod for the (headless) game servers. As an 
indirect dependency, libggz is pulled in. All of those libraries can usually 
be installed painlessly on most distributions, e.g. 'apt-get install ggz' on 
Debian. All libraries have for years gone through a process of ensuring 
API/ABI stability, changing sonames whenever features were 
added/modified/removed.

Any comments? The current glChess client is supposed to be refactored into a 
generic gnome-games online gaming client. In order to be able to push forward 
with such development and additional clients, I think the dependency is more 
useful than internal copies with its security flaws, back-and-forward-syncing 
and additional maintenance.

Josef

[resent as I'm now subscribed to this list temporarily]