Re: Maintainership of gnome-games

["Richard Hoelscher" <rah rahga com>]

Nicu Buculei said:
> Andreas Røsdal wrote:
>>
>> The current policy for new games is that: "Gnome Games is a very large
>> package and there is neither the room for new games or the time to
>> maintain them."
>
> If i counted correctly, 3 people offered to either maintain gnome-games
> or help with the maintenance (Jason, Richard and you) and other people
> expressed intention to help in various ways, so maybe time is not the
> main problem,
>

Time per developer spent actively developing on gnome-games is a problem
at the moment, especially if you take a look at the just the last year.
Gone are the days when any regular contributor fixed more bugs in a month
than you can count on one hand... That time has been temporarily gone in
my case, but the fact remains that a whole lot more activity is happening
on this list lately than in cvs. :)

>> So increased space of the gnome-games distribution, and the effort to
>> maintain the current games are the current reasons not to include new
>> games.
>
> Size *is* a serious concern and you are absolutely correct a limit have
> to be imposed.

When it's been said that ~"gnome-games is already quite large", IMHO, the
point isn't that the package can not get larger or should be limited.
Rather, taking on more games would simply be reckless and irresponsible
until things get significantly better.

It's not all bad though... Out of 68 bugs, all but 25 are enhancement
requests, and a lot of them are quite iffy. Less than two real bugs per
game. The vast majority of all bugs are less than 2 years old.

>> How would we decide in an objective way which new games to include?  For
>> the time being, I don't think that we should change this policy.
>
> I will be brutal here: i find the gnome-games pretty boring, i use to
> play them mostly to test how bad my themes work with them (and yes, i
> like to play games).

Gnome-games at was once a great big ball of esoteric diversions... Having
rebranded versions of Connect Four, Yahtzze, and Othello wasn't much a
problem when you also had *tris, a turing machine, Chess, and a text
adventure game interpreter.... However, those board games were always
boring to play against the computer, fun against people. Gataxx almost
falls into that camp, as does gnibbles. In other words, 1/3rd of
gnome-games are a lot more fun if you aren't playing by yourself.

At the heart of the issue, and jrb's original comments, is that the desire
to apply some sort of feng shui to our offering would be a really good
thing. I think this is a editorial problem that would best be solved at
the distributor level, keeping gnome-games focused on providing a variety
of well-maintained and simple games.... but this would never work in the
real world.

I'm almost convinced that the presentation is simply wrong, and a slight
change would make most of the complaints disappear. A collection of games
just looks bad whenever it's listed as part of the menu, and it always
will. Could we just go the way of (for lack of better examples) Redmond's
Control Panel? Click Programs->Games, and you get a window with program
icons for all the games.

Oh well, I'm still thinking about this. :)

-Richard Hoelscher
rah rahga com