[gcompris-devel] Re: Wishes for 2003

[bruno]

Le mer 08/01/2003 à 20:40, Herman Bruyninckx a écrit :
> On 8 Jan 2003, Bruno Coudoin wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > >  Maybe some focued advocacy actions towards a students
> > > public could be successful, especially if there is some price involved.
> > > I am willing to donate for example 100EUR for this purpose, and if other
> > > people join in a cash price of let's say 1000EUR in combination with
> > > lots of noise on the Linux channels could get the necessary interest :-)
> >
> > That's a great idea. Do you have an idea on how we could promote and
> > manage this ?
> 
> I think there are three steps:
> - think hard about what exactly we want to achieve by the contest.
> - prepare the website, the code and the press releases.
> - talk to the open source web press (international), the edudcational
>   groups (seul, ...), and the local school IT administrations (national)
>   about it.
> 
That's a huge project, I can't handle that alone. 
I copy the ofset list since I am part of it and it may be a good site to
promote the event.
Also ofset is an official organisation (french based) that will help us
getting fundings.

I am OK to start to prepare this event. I will present this project to
the FOSDEM.

Beside working on this I suggest to make some technical changes to
gcompris. Today, it is not possible to distribute activities
independantly.
What happens is that even if gcompris is internaly designed to allow
this, the current xml menu system is not flexible enough.
I started to change that in a way that i will parse all boards in the
boards directory to create the menus, not only the single menu.xml.
So that just putting a file xxx.xml in the board directory an the entry
will appear in gcompris.
To achieve this, I add  a section and menuposition value to the menu
xml.
Then, I will be able to generate the screenshots html page on the
gcompris web site in the same order then the menu/submenu. Today the
screenshot page is toooooo long.
Next, we will be able to add a download by activity.

This will really show the full potential of the flexibility of gcompris,
and to me is mandatory for the contest.

> The contest _could_ be split in several sub-categories: board
> implementations, overal design suggestions, implementation of generic
> infrastructure code. For the latter two, integration/cooperation with
> other projects would be a requirement.
> 
> [...]
> > Yes but we have a toolkit issue. Tuxpaint is an SDL application.
> >
> > Also, tuxpaint by itself is wellknown, well maintained and in this case,
> > it maybe better to keep its author improve its project.
> 
> Yes. But look at it this way: just as you have the KDE and Gnome
> projects that work on a "meta level" with respect to individual
> application projects, the area of educational games would benefit from
> such "standardisation/integration" effort for the common infrastructure
> of all simple games. After all, that's what open source is most suited
> for: sharing of infrastructure code and designs.
> 
Yes, I agree and that the way I designed gcompris but I some point, the
hard reality of the technical limitation arise ;)
Anyway, that's deep in my mind.

> [...]
> > But for now, I personnaly prefer to stick to create more content in the
> > existing framework.
> Of course, the users are only interested in content, and it's exactly
> that content that is attracting attention to GCompris. But finding ways
> to simplify both content creation and portability would make the whole
> thing much easier for the maintainers. (In the long term :-)
> 
In portability, do you mean Windows?

> Herman
> 
> -- 
>   K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
> <http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480
> 
> 
> 
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