Re: gnome-games 2.16.0 released and branched for 2.17

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Richard Hoelscher wrote:

> The problem is that SVGs for card games tend to be large, and Aisleriot
> renders the entire deck in one pass because of the monolithic deck format.
> It can't kick it out to another thread because of non-threadsafe Pango
> (IIRC ATM). As long as you are doing this, resizing the window or starting
> the game will always hit a delay. The only real solutions are split the
> elements into multiple SVG files, or to tag the elements with a name that
> librsvg can use to render (then render each element during and idle loop,
> yada yada...).

> While I had a testcase working for the latter in Mahjongg,
> I'm afraid this would just be another solution that absolutely nobody in
> the Inkscape community would grok because they
> (a) don't have decent layer support, and

it is getting a little better, the planned layer dialog has taken longer
than expected though.  Inkscape 0.44 does include a Layers palette
(Ctrl+Shift+L).  If you have already seen it and there are problems
with it I would be willing to file requests and bug reports against
Inkscape on behalf of Gnome games.

> (b) a scared stiff of text editors and XML [*].
>
> Given the horrendous SVG XML that Inkscape generates, I can actually
> sympathize with them on point (b).

This isn't likely to get better anytime soon unfortunately.  Using SVG
like as if it were code is low on the list of priorities.  I wish Jasc
Webdraw had not died, it was all about producing clean markup.

> [*] ... Among other things, bugs like #352084 simply broke my will to hack.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352084

It has been marked as Low and as an enhancement.  If you want to outline a
more aggressive policy perhaps we could help you by categorising certain
types of reports and make it easier for you to filter out the ones you are
not interested in?  Most users will understand accept that these things
are not high priority and that patches are welcome but that developers
prefer to focus on other areas.

Also putting together a Roadmaps or in some way making it clearer what you
are interested in working on should help reduce requests for things youa
are not interested in, and allow gnome games as a group to manage user
expectations.  I am happy to do what I can to allow you to make more
productive use of your time and help you if i can to continue to enjoy
working on gnome games.

It is natural to experience some burnout and want to switch to different
projects and although I hope you will keep an interst in gnome games I
thank you for all the work you have done until now.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/