Re: gbrainy & GNOME games

["Thomas H.P. Andersen" <phomes gmail com>]

Here is an email I sent to Jordi back in late November (wow, that far
back already) :(. I have a draft for a more lengthy blog post about
this but I have to get my presentation for tomorrow ready first.
Basically it covers issues like:
- identifying the role of the gnome-games team. Are we code
maintainers or judges of games to include in gnome?
- do distributions want this or do they want to choose games individually?
- do we want yet more dependencies? Will/can we maintain more
games/code languages?
- is adding more games better or worse. The list is already pretty
long in the menu. Distributions can use
--enable-games=list_of_games_they_want
- does gnome-games size matter to distributions?
- do we want every gnome based game under the sun in one module?
- what do users want? New games pr. default, more games, more choice
of different games, more diversity in games (less puzzle based games,
a children game pr. default)?
- now that we have swfdec should/will distributions start looking at
flash based games? Can / should we have some sort of support for this?
- do game developers want a separate games support library to use
instead of keeping it inside gnome-games?

This is just my quick ramblings. The blog post will be more structured
:) It's basically just about getting some more input from the
stakeholders to base our decisions on. I will get this posted on
planet tomorrow evening - promise ;)

The mail:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've been following your development of the game with interest and I
really like it. The biggest problem I see is the dependencies. I'm no
mono hater but there is a lot of politics around the issue and the
might cause some problems.

Another point which I intend to blog about once I hit planet is the
point of having a gnome-games package at all. For some of the games it
makes sense as they use the gnome-games support library. But then some
others don't and the only real reason that they are in gnome-games is
so that the get distributed automatically. The question is whether it
makes sense that we choose what games should get in or not. I would
rather have the distributions take that decision and pick the games
they want individually.

Yet another problem is maintenance. We currently use C, C++, scheme
and python for the games. If we add mono that's yet another language
I'd have to know fairly well to be a capable maintainer of. While I
know you would want to continue as maintainer and continue development
it makes little sense to me to have a lot of maintainers of subsystems
in one module. Robert Ancell currently maintains chess, Thomas M. Hinkle
sudoku, Christian Persch and Vincent Povirk aisleriot. Not officially
but in practice. It works pretty well but I don't see why we don't
just use different modules for this.

I have yet to make up my mind as to what direction I think we should
go. There are plans to make python bindings for the library to make
chess and sudoku use that as well. Maybe we could get some
monobindings as well. But in the end I'm not too sure how much your
gbrainy would gain from that. (highscore, clocks, boards, etc.)

But I'll keep you posted and I hope to get some opinions from the
gnome community as well as the distributors when I get on planet. But
I want to wait with the discussion until then as I want to reach a
broader audience than just the gnome-games mailinglist. These are also just my
thoughts currently and I haven't discussed it much with the other
developers.

On Jan 20, 2008 11:53 AM, Jordi Mas <jmas softcatala org> wrote:
> Hello Andreas,
> > 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.
>
> This would solve an important issue: games that are not part of
> gnome-games have a big challenge in reaching more users, potential
> contributors, getting packaged for more distros and so on.
>
> Another idea would be to split gnome-games in different packets
> according to the kind of games that they are card games, arcade games,
> logic games, board games and you could have a different maintainer for
> every package.
>
> It would be good if we can find an approach where gnome-games helps new
> games to reach more audience and acts as umbrella project. Right now,
> gnome-games can only really help the games included in its own package.
>
> Regards,
>
> --
>
> Jordi Mas i Hernàndez, HomePage http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas/
> Bloc personal http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas/bloc/
> Planeta Softcatalà: http://www.softcatala.org/planet/
>
>
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