Re: GNOME Games split

["Thomas H.P. Andersen" <phomes gmail com>]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:33 PM, Robert Ancell <robert ancell gmail com> wrote:
> On 16 October 2012 23:01, Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> wrote:
>>
>> I wonder: are you looking for maintainers for any of these games, or
>> are you going to take charge of all of them? Also, are any of these
>> deemed to be "core" right now?
>
> We're currently discussing the maintainership of them at the moment:
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/games-list/2012-October/msg00001.html
> Short answer, I think if anyone was looking to maintain a project
> (e.g. someone who is learning GNOME) then they'd be very welcome.

As I wrote in the linked mail I would like to keep maintaining
swell-foop and five-or-more.
For the rest my plan was to keep doing the regular releases, build
fixes, porting, etc to keep the games alive. But I would love to see
someone take over maintainership and active development of the
individual games. I will also gladly "mentor" anyone interested in
gradually taking over if there is need for that.

> Regarding which ones are core, I was waiting for you to ask that :)
>
> Well, it really depends on what we want for the default install. I
> agree we want a smaller set of higher quality games.
>
> This is the current Ubuntu software center ratings (number of stars
> and number of ratings):
>
> gnome-tetravex 5 (5)
> lightsoff 5 (2)
> gnome-robots 5 (1)
> gnome-mahjongg 4 (21)
> aisleriot 4 (10)
> gnome-chess 4 (6)
> swell-foop 4 (1)
> gnome-sudoku 3.5 (5)
> gnome-klotski 3.5 (3)
> four-in-a-row 3 (2)
> gnome-mines 3 (2)
> gnome-nibbles 2.5 (4)
> iagno 2 (2)
> quadrapassel 1.5 (6)
> five-or-more 1.5 (5)
> tali 0 (0)
>
> Note I've included aisleriot which was split out of GNOME games earlier.
>
> The numbers are too small to draw too much from this but this
> indicates to me that people like tetravex, lightsoff, mahjongg,
> aisleriot, chess, sudoku. In Ubuntu we ship aisleriot, mahjongg, mines
> and sudoku.
>
> In terms of the games that are in the best code state and thus easiest
> to improve the design of we should look at tetravex, lightsoff,
> mahjongg, chess, swell-foop, mines, iagno, quadrapassel. Sudoku and
> five-or-more are in progress being updated.
>
> So, I think we should decide based on the following:
> - A range of games that cover easy games that children can play to
> difficult puzzles suitable for adults.
> - Games that are modern and fun
> - A small enough set that can be effectively maintained and improved
> to keep standard high
> - A small enough set that can be effectively browsed from the shell
>
> Thoughts?

Tali and four-in-a-row are so dull that smoketesting them before
releases is almost painful. Robots and klotski looks/feels really
dated. I think that we can quickly scratch those as candidates for the
best games.

- Thomas