Re: Proposing dependencies for gnome-games

[Andreas Røsdal <andreasr gnome org>]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Josef Spillner wrote:
> 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.

I'd like to add my support for GGZ as an external dependency of GNOME 2.22.0.
This would give gnome-games a better supported multiplayer service, 
and improve the current situation a lot. Note that KDE games has also 
chosen to use GGZ for multiplayer support, so others are also moving in this 
direction.

I was very pleased with using GGZ to implement the multiplayer support in 
some of the gnome-games. There are still some areas where GGZ can be 
better (eg. user-interface), but this is something which is being worked 
on and will become better.

 - Andreas R.