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



On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 07:05:07PM +0200, Andreas Røsdal wrote:
> 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.

Hi Andreas,

Boiling down your email, it seems the overriding worry is that of distro
support for GGZ and ensuring that GGZ support is compiled into
gnome-games by the distros. I completely sympathise with your worry and
don't think that anybody wants that to happen. With the increase in use
of GGZ this should become much less of a worry. With GNOME, KDE and
FreeCiv using GGZ as a dependency then it's a much more noticable issue
for the distros. Applying pressure to get them to include the features
is a better solution than working around it in my opinion :)

Obviously we're very keen to have the libraries external as it helps
raise our profile. I'm sure it will happen, we're just stuck in a
chicken and egg situation at the moment.

The other thing you mentioned is that of translations. What happens now
with external dependencies that don't have sufficiently good
translations? From my point of view, I don't see a significant
difference between your translators translating our code that is
mirrored in your repository and your translators translating our strings
directly. Does this kind of thing happen elsewhere in GNOME?

Something you might be interested in - over the past six-ish days there
have been 242 games of gnect played on gnome.ggzgamingzone.org, 239
games of gnibbles and 50 games of iagno.

Cheers,

Roger

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