Proposing dependencies for gnome-games (fwd)

[Andreas Røsdal <andreasr gnome org>]

Hi!

I'm forwaring this proposal for GGZ Gaming Zone as a new external 
dependency to GNOME. The latest version supported by gnome-games is 
0.0.14, and can be found here: http://www.ggzgamingzone.org/

It has been over a week since the proposal, and it seems there is a 
consensus on the mailing list. At least it's not a very controversial 
suggestion, and all in all I think it will be a great improvement to
GNOME Games.


 - Andreas


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:24:36 +0200
From: Josef Spillner <spillner kde org>
To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Proposing dependencies for gnome-games

Hello,

gnome-games has for some time offered online gaming capabilities on top of the
GGZ Gaming Zone platform. Three games are already working fine, a fourth one
is currently being ported. As an upstream author of GGZ I'm very pleased to
see this.

However, gnome-games includes internal copies of all GGZ libraries in its SVN,
with the justification of wanting to have GGZ support even if the distro in
question doesn't have GGZ packages yet. Recently, a member of the Debian
security team got very upset about this as this requires patching more
packages.
I share these concerns, especially since there are no major distros left that
do not include recent GGZ packages.

I was pointed out that in order to let gnome-games' configure script fail when
no external GGZ libraries are found, I would need to propose those libraries
as external dependencies on this list.
So here I am. The proposal encompasses libggzmod and libggzcore for the client
applications as well as libggzdmod for the (headless) game servers. As an
indirect dependency, libggz is pulled in. All of those libraries can usually
be installed painlessly on most distributions, e.g. 'apt-get install ggz' on
Debian. All libraries have for years gone through a process of ensuring
API/ABI stability, changing sonames whenever features were
added/modified/removed.

Any comments? The current glChess client is supposed to be refactored into a
generic gnome-games online gaming client. In order to be able to push forward
with such development and additional clients, I think the dependency is more
useful than internal copies with its security flaws, back-and-forward-syncing
and additional maintenance.

Josef

[resent as I'm now subscribed to this list temporarily]
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