Re: Gnome Games 2.17.91

[Andreas Røsdal <andrearo pvv ntnu no>]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Josef Spillner wrote:
> I thought about the HIG compliance a bit. In addition to HIG, there might be
> other features that a GNOME multiplayer framework integration needs.

Hello Josef,

It seems like a good idea to look more closely at how the development 
effort of these two projects best can cooperate.

For example, GNOME has now translated a lot of the user interfaces for GGZ 
to many languages which would have been impossible for GGZ alone, while 
gnome-games reuses a lot of code directly from GGZ.

Another important thing is the hosting infrastructure which could host 
ggz servers for gnome-games. We have the 
server gnome.ggzgamingzone.org, which is the only server listed in the 
games at the moment. (There is also a server running on 
games.gnome.org, but this server isn't a long term solution.)
I think that supporting the server hosted by the 
GGZ project at gnome.ggzgamingzone.org, possibly asking for funding from 
the GNOME foundation etc if that would be neccesary.

Further, it could be useful to discuss how GGZ is distributed: currectly 
it is bundled with gnome-games. Another solution would be to request that 
GGZ becomes an external dependency of gnome-games. But that would result 
in the user interfaces of GGZ to not be properly translated (as you said).

If GGZ had a stable version labeled "1.0", it would also be easier to request it as an 
external dependency for GNOME.


> Since there are already changes in your CVS which are not yet in GGZ's SVN,
> ggz-gtk and the libraries used by it appear to need a fork. However, that's
> not a fork in the usual sense, but a modification of our GGZ Gtk+ Client and
> GGZ Gtk+ Games collections to fit into GNOME.
>
> There's also a ggz-gnome package available from GGZ, but it's basically dead
> and scheduled for removal (lack of maintenance is the sole reason).
> There are two ways ahead:
> - we continue merging changes of GGZ code back and forth
> - we declare some of the GGZ-Gtk+ stuff in GNOME CVS to be the new GGZ-GNOME
> and decouple it from our GGZ-Gtk+ development to some extent

The latter one is fine. However, there is also the chat and player list 
dialogs, which is also distributed separately with both GGZ and 
gnome-games.


> I'm strongly opting for the latter one. There is just one argument against it
> which I can think out of my head, it's that GGZ won't get translations "for
> free" anymore. When looking at the ggz-gtk screenshot in Thai language at
> 	http://thep.blogspot.com/2007/01/toward-gnome-218.html
> this makes me a bit sad.

Yes, it is quite impressive how the gnome translators can make 
the games available in so many languages.

 - Andreas