Re: gbrainy & GNOME games

[Andreas Røsdal <andreasr gnome org>]

On Sat, 19 Jan 2008, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jan 2008, Jordi Mas wrote:
>
> > Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2008 13:57:06 +0100
> > For the last six months I have been working on gbrainy[1], a brain
>
> I noticed Gbraining very early on from your Planet Gnome posts.  It is
> always good when games can serve an educational purpose, even if it is
> something as simple as training users in basic keyboard skills or
> familiarising them with concepts such as drag and drop, or pie menus, and
> to turn a learning challenge into something more fun.  It is great that
> you have decided to create such an educational game using GTK.
>
> Gnome Games does not yet include Mono.  On that basis I assumed it was
> unlikely to become part of Gnome Games and restrained myself from
> expressing my dismay at the choice of name with a g- prefix.  Very old
> school.
>
> Long term maintainance of games has been a problem and Gnome Games will
> need to continue to support games like Aisleriot for a very long time.
> The maintainers may feel it is worth including gbrainy but given the past
> problems and the need to dump several unmaintained games I would be
> suprised if they took that step just yet ... but you never know.

I agree with Alan's review here; Although Gbrainy looks like a
very interesting game, I don't think any new games should be
included in GNOME Games.

The gnome-games package is already very large, and there is a lot of
work maintaining it in the current state. The last time two new games
were included in August 2006, and we are still working on fixing critical
crasher bugs in those.

Gbrainy is implemented using Mono, unlike the other games which
are written in Python and C. Therefore including it would not bring
any synergies from sharing code with other games.

Although I don't think there is room for more games in the
main gnome-games distribution, perhaps instead new proposals such as
gbrainy could be included in a new package, for example 
gnome-games-extra-data.


 - Andreas