[Kde-games-devel] Releasing and installing data files

[Josef Spillner]

Good morning,

On Tuesday 19 August 2003 05:29, Ian Wadham wrote:
> For new readers, KGoldrunner has about 200 levels files.  To avoid the
> administrative overhead and risk of errors and omissions in Makefile.am
> and CVS, I have packed the files into a single "levels.tar" file, with an
> extra "install:" step in the Makefile.am to untar the files. 

Well you could always just do cvs add *.grl :)

...
> The only solutions I can think of are:
...

4.
Use tar --mode=644 --no-same-owner
and omit the last two lines in the Makefile.am.
The questions is whether this is compatible to other Unices, in such a case a 
fallback would be needed.

> KDE and Linux will need measures like that, to segregate
> responsibility, as they get bigger and more complex.  Otherwise
> they will wind up with security not much more sophisticated
> than Windows has.

Once Linux gets some security built-in, KDE will certainly provide nice GUI 
frontends for configuration. Right now, Linux hardly supports more than file 
permissions and ACLs.

> There should be some easier way to compose and distribute
> new data files (e.g. new levels for a game) than by going through
> the full development and release cycle, with automake, autoconf,
> CVS, and all the knowledge they entail.  If I am a photographer
> and I have some nice pictures to add to the photo-processor
> package's libraries, I should be able to do so with almost
> zero technical knowledge of KDE and Linux.

There's the classical open source way of handling this problem: Ask someone 
who does know about it ;)
Seriously, if your game supports KStandardDirs properly, it shouldn't be hard 
to access levels that are in ~/.kde/share/apps/kgoldrunner.

Josef

-- 
Play for fun, win for freedom.
Linux-Info-Tag Dresden 2003: http://www.linux-dresden.de