Re: GNOME Mastermind 0.3 string freeze (fwd)

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 23 May 2007, [ISO-8859-1] Andreas Røsdal wrote:

> Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 21:04:06 +0200 (CEST)
> From: "[ISO-8859-1] Andreas Røsdal" <andreasr gnome org>
> To: Filippo Argiolas <filippo argiolas gmail com>
> Cc: games-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: GNOME Mastermind 0.3 string freeze (fwd)
>
> I'm forwarding this to the gnome-games mailing list to see that others
> think about gnome-mastermind. Take a look at the bugzilla link for my
> opinion.

The quit button on the toolbar would have to go for starters.  (Quit is a
destructive action you cannot easily get back from and something you dont
want to do accidently and we have the window decoration for that.  Or if
you don't like that then the simpler reason is none of the other gnome
games do it that way.)

Only one toolbar item is too few to have a toolbar (should be 3 at a
minimum really, same goes for menus) and unless there are other things you
might put there then it would be better turned off entirely.

Getting more translations and documentation would certainly be a good
start towards getting the game included in future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)
The game is licensed to Hasbro.  Would we get stuck by the usual issues of
naming and copyrights if we held on to the name "Gnome Mastermind"?  I
would hope the developers would - and all Gnome developers - have cleanly
abstracted out the name so that it could be changed without any messing.

Themes use colour but no texture or shape which makes it not very friendly
for users with visual difficulties.

"If you look at the code please don't care too much about style issues and
some portion redundancy: it's still an early version so it still needs
some love ;)"
The author says the program needs further code review.  This should
probably be addressed before proposing the game for inclusion in Gnome.
Although I'm confident the author wants to continue to maintain his
software it has happened many times before - and the reason why other
programs had to be removed from Gnome Games - that he might be unable to
do that through no fault of his own.

You'd think there would be a standard procedure or HOWTO explaining all
this by now, I guess when there are 48 hours in the day I might get around
to doing something like that.

Good looking program though, may well earn a place in Gnome Games at some
later date.

-- 
Alan