[gcompris-devel] bug report about no text only voices

Sun Aug 18 14:27:28 UTC 2013

in-line :-

On 8/18/13, Bruno Coudoin <bruno.coudoin at gcompris.net> wrote:
> Le 17/08/2013 21:32, shirish शिरीष a écrit :
>> Hi all,
>> I tried to see if there is a bug-tracker in gcompris but unfortunately
>> seems the developer (Brian) does not use a bug-tracker, or if there is
>> a bug tracker please point the same to me.
> Probably not enough easy to find but it is mentioned here:
> http://gcompris.net/-Documentation,10-

Dear Bruno,
Thank you for getting back immediately. So it seems I was at fault.

> So our bugzilla is here :
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/query.cgi
>

Ah got it,

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=gcompris&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED

<snipped>

> I agree with you. In newer activities we are more careful at that. A
> workaround would be to display the manual when the children enters an
> activity. Do you think this is a good idea?

What could be perhaps done is to have a checkbox in gcompris core somewhere
so when you are new, it defaults to having the help window open and
later when the checkbox is unticked (which means you are familiar with
the various activities/apps. under Gcompris it defaults to the
behavior present now.)

This should make both people happy. I dunno if this can be done via
some gcompris.ini or maybe some entry in the sqlite database which can
be toggled as I just saw

~/.config/gcompris$ ls
gcompris_sqlite.db

So there doesn't seem to be any .ini file.

> On the other way, I am not a teacher but letting children search what
> must be done can be seen as a part of the educational value of an activity.
>

True, fair enough.

>> There is also the use-case where in school you do not have speakers
>> (and have been to many schools where there are no speakers i.e. no
>> music) . In such a scenario you are left clueless unless you take the
>> time to read the manual.
> We added the intro voices as a workaround for the lack of instructions.
> Maybe a good option would be to have the intro voice as text as well and
> display it when the activity starts.

That is exactly what I am/was aiming for.

>> If need be I could name probably a dozen or so activities which I use
>> which have the same issue (or maybe more).
>>
>> b. This is more of a wishlist bug, it would be great to have map based
>> geography and names puzzles. Something like these :-
>>
>> http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/states_experiment_drag-drop_Intermed_State15s_500.html
>>
>> While this is obviously geared for the American market and geography,
>> maybe something with the world would be nice, if such a game exists in
>> Gcompris 137 activities please guide me where to find it ?
> You can see the list of all the activities there:
> http://gcompris.net/-On-one-page-
>
> In GCompris we have 2 activities related to geography:
> http://gcompris.net/en-geo_country
> http://gcompris.net/en-geography

Nice, didn't see those at first glance.

> Now I realize that these are not easy to find, they are in
> /discovery/miscelaneous. You will see that in the help of each activity
> at the top there is the formal location of the activity, it includes the
> path like a directory structure.
>
>>
>> c. Which brings me to the third point, at 137 activities it becomes
>> next to impossible to find things on many levels . For e.g. :-
>>
>> a. Which activities are new activities which were not there in the
>> previous version ? There should be some visual indicator which tells
>> and attracts players to the newest activities. If there is such a way
>> please guide/share how it's indicated to a user. I looked at the raw
>> changelog to get some ideas of the new activities but this cannot be
>> assumed for regular people/joe. The only thing to know there are new
>> activities was by looking at the debian bug-report which I just took
>> as a chance in the Debian changelog #694103 . I would propose to have
>> a #NEWS.gz at the very least for people to know what those 13 new
>> activities (or whatever new activities arrive in version 13.0 and
>> above .
> I always create a release note and it contains what's new in this release.
>
> For example you can see the release notes of the latest stable release
> there:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/gcompris/files/12.11/
>
> There are also the latest news here:
> http://gcompris.net/-News-
>
> This information is also on this list.

Ah, I filed a bug in debian for the same. Please see
bugs.debian.org/720077 . What you could do to help is maybe have a
NEWS.gz which basically parses the content of the News webpage and
puts it in a textual gunzipped file which can be carried by various
distributions. I have seen many projects use the NEWS.gz to do similar
. I see around 5k packages doing the same behavior.

On debian and debian-derivative distributions you could find (if you
have apt-file installed and the index updated)

apt-file search NEWS.gz

which lists all the packages which have NEWS.gz

A sample one :-

/usr/share/doc/xchat-gnome$ ls
AUTHORS  changelog.Debian.gz  changelog.gz  copyright  NEWS.gz

>> I hope this could be added to some TODO or some roadmap. If there is a
>> TODO or a tentative roadmap . If such a thing exists please point out
>> at the resource. I did look at the wiki but wasn't able to find the
>> same.
> In our wiki, follow "Developer's corner" from the main page and then got
> in "Ideas for activities".

Cool, got it http://gcompris.net/wiki/Ideas_for_activities

> We don't have a roadmap but a list of thinks we'd like to have. I
> propose contributors to look at it if they don't know what they want to
> do for GCompris. I cannot force anybody to work on anything particular.
> I integrate any proposed works that have the expected quality level and
> are in the spirit of GCompris.

Nice I might spread around Gcompris in some gaming circles I know. If
nothing else we might get some good art which could be per-used in
some future activities.

Btw, could it be possible to have some sort of (under progress, Idea,
completed) some sort of understanding as to which are active ideas and
which could use some help.

I did notice that you did put up my idea in gcompris-core :-

http://gcompris.net/wiki/Ideas_for_activities#GCompris_core

>> b. Keywords, tags :- I don't know if there is a way to do that but
>> would be nice. If the games could be defined by some keywords it would
>> be more discoverable. As number of activities increase this would
>> become more and more urgent.
> We already have a manual for each activity. We don't need a tag for
> this. I agree that this feature would be nice to have and already though
> of it. I just added it in our 'idea list'.

o.k. fair enough. Although the idea of tags is that some attributes of
the game are there.

See for e.g. http://wiki.debian.org/Debtags as one implementation of
tags for people to find packages .

>> If I'm not able to make any sense (because of my poor English skills
>> or something) please get back to me and I'll try to be more precise.
>>
> As a French, your English is perfect for me.

Thank you for your patience.

> Bruno.

-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
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