Re: [pkg-ggz-maintainers] [Secure-testing-team] A case of large code duplication

[Andreas Røsdal <andrearo pvv ntnu no>]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Josef Spillner wrote:
> On Monday 08 October 2007 23:33:24 Jason D. Clinton wrote:
> > Ok, so just so we're clear from this massive list of CC's, who's doing
> > what and what do we (Gnome Games maintainers) need to do to help clear
> > this up?
>
> Sorry, have been away for a few days. The gnome games task would be to remove
> the internal copies of all non-GUI GGZ libraries and use the system-wide
> installations instead. And of course to mention any problems if there are
> some :)

I would _strongly_ prefer that the embedded GGZ in gnome-games remains 
unchanged, at least until GGZ has become a blessed external dependency.

The reason that the GGZ libraries are embedded within gnome-games is that 
GGZ wasn't available in most distributions, or not with the version 
supported by gnome-games (GGZ 0.0.14 at the release of gnome-games 
2.18.0).

gnome-games also has a history of having network support using 
zeroconf (bonjour), before GGZ was implemented. The big problem then, was 
that distributions either didn't include the libraries required for 
network support, or they didn't care to configure/conpile gnome-games
with the network support enabled. Therefore there were very few players 
using the network multiplayer, simply because it wasn't available for 
their distribution by default. By having GGZ embedded, this is not a 
problem at the moment.

Here is the info about how to get GGZ as a external dependency for GNOME:
http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentyone/ExternalDependencies
So if you can convince everyone that GGZ should be a GNOME dependency,
then I'm all for that!

Moreover, it's not much of a problem for gnome-games to have GGZ embedded,
because it doesn't add much to the total size of the binaries, gnome-games 
has full control over the changes, and most importantly, everything is 
garanteed to be translated by the GNOME translators.

Finally, the open source game Freeciv also was embedding GGZ, for the same 
reasons as above (guaranteed GGZ library available). In fact, the 
embedding code for GGZ in gnome-games was taken directly from Freeciv.

By removing the embedded GGZ, I fear that gnome-games will go back to the 
previous situation where multiplayer support was implemented, but never 
enabled by default for users.

 - Andreas