Re: Lib Gnome Must Die

["Callum McKenzie" <callum physics otago ac nz>]

>
> http://live.gnome.org/LibgnomeMustDie
>
> quote: "gnome-score: Deprecated yes, replaced no. This is the gnome-games
> maintainer's fault."
>
This has been the bane of my (gnome-games maintainer) life. The high
scores code has needed replacing for a long time now, so heres the story:

About a year ago I got an email from one of the libgnome maintainers
asking if it was OK to deprecate gnome-score and gnome-scores. At the time
I was anticipating replacing it during the 2.9/2.10 release cycle so I
said yes, go ahead. The replacement for gnome-scores, games-scores-dialog,
did get written in that time-frame. Unfortunately the replacement for
gnome-score didn't. Hence the note I added on the Wiki.

For those who are confused about the difference between gnome-score and
gnome-scores: gnome-score manipulates the high score data, gnome-scores
displays the high score data.

Writing the replacement has been slow because I kept changing my ideas
about what the code should do. Finally, in June, while stuck in Heathrow,
I wrote out the simplest API I could think of, removed half the functions
and started coding. Some of this code appears in 2.11/2.12, but it isn't
usable on that branch. I have code in preview-2-13 which should, in
principle,
be 60% there. i.e. it can read and display high scores and has all but the
back-end code to write them (there are some locking issues that need to be
resolved, but otherwise this code should be straight-forward). I can say
with a great deal of confidence that this code will appear in 2.13/2.14.

The high scores files will remain the same, with some of the pathological
behaviour removed. The code which reads these files has been separated
into a "backend" so changing file formats in the future is simpler. (File
formats and how much data to store had been the indecision that held up
all previous efforts to replace gnome-score.)

As far as a bug goes, there isn't a general one yet (Mahjongg has one, see
bug #302935) and I don't want one quite yet until I've got everything
ready to go.

Has this explanation created more or less comfusion?

 - Callum