Re: splitting up gnome-games

[Jason Clinton <me jasonclinton com>]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 10:30, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:

I'd like to float the idea of splitting up gnome-games upstream into
separate git modules.  The main rationale is that downstream, we want
separate binary packages; this is most convenient to do if upstream is
separate modules.

Having separate binaries would make application installation/removal
saner, and avoid pulling in the large dependency set of the games as
one unit.

Also, if there are any other git modules that ship multiple
applications (i.e. .desktop files and executables), I'd like to see
that split up too.

This doesn't really make sense because a libgnome-games would be entirely private to GNOME Games and yet would need to be spun off in to a separate module, make separate releases and maintain API guarantees. We don't have the time or resources for that. Up until a few weeks ago we managed to keep up with the ever-shifting API deprecations but were just hit particularly hard by the rendering clean up. It will be a scramble to get that done.

If someone wants to volunteer to provide that kind of API stability over the long-term, that may be the case for the coming months or years but they will eventually tire of the work and we'll be left with a core library with no maintainer. And for what gain, exactly?

Separating the games out would also depend on the r-t proposal for separating the modules coming to fruition.

Also, please feel free to raise any concerns you have on the games-list.