[gcompris-devel] Release 8.5PRE1

[Bruno Coudoin]

I just uploaded a preview version of the major rework we did in the last
few months.

There is 2 majors changes from GCompris 8.4:

- Each activity is in it's own directory. This has allowed us to provide
  OLPC XO bundles by activity. By the way for now, I still ship xo bundle
  based on the gcomprixo branch that is gnomecanvas based.
- We now use the goocanvas instead of the gnomecanvas. The goocanvas has
  a similar API but uses a cairo backend for the drawing. It's more modern,
  provides a good anti aliasasing and is native SVG.
- You can resize a GCompris windows and we no more use xvidmod to change
  the resolution. Great, we won't crash X anymore due to bad drivers.

Know Issue:
- You can run an individual activity within the source code (src directory)
  by running ./runit.sh <activity-dir>. This will work only if compiled with
  --disable-sqlite.
- The drawing activity save/load feature is broken (waiting for next goocanvas
  release)
- The animation activity won't play a single animation.

What you can do to help:
- Test it on your platform and report here compilation and execution issue.
- Someone with python skill could rework or rewrite our animation activity.
  this activity is very appreciated but the code is not very cute and I have
  trouble migrating it to the goocanvas. It's a good opportunity to rework it
  deeply so that it can work again and why not add missing feature. My son is
  requesting a grouping feature for example.
- Graphism should be moved to svg everywhere it makes sense. This is especially
  important for the skins images but also for the activities images, background
  and items (matou already started a long time ago and proposed to continue).

-- 
Bruno Coudoin
http://gcompris.net Free educational software for kids
http://toulibre.org Logiciel Libre à Toulouse