[Kde-games-devel] Status of games in SVN

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Ian Wadham wrote:
> So how can I "continue to run the KDE 3 versions as they are"?  Even if
> somehow I get hold of an old executable, what about the shared libraries?
> If I run KDE 3's KGoldrunner in my KDE 4 account, I get:
> 
> /opt/kde3/bin/kgoldrunner: symbol lookup /extra/kde4/kde/lib/libkdegames.so.1: 
> undefined symbol: _ZNK12KConfigGroup9groupListEv ... :-(

This is one of the questions I asked in the original email (or that I 
mean to ask, sorry for not being clearer.) I suppose it will be possible 
to run KDE3 applications in a KDE4 desktop, after installation of the 
appropriate libs (something most package systems can take care of.) 
Otherwise, people will go crazy, think about all the existing KDE3 
applications that are not ported so far. Maybe we are not there yet, and 
some libraries have to be renamed in order to make it work?
This is probably a question for the core developers list. Does anyone 
know the answer to this question?

> At the very least, I think we have to provide versions of all the existing
> KDE 3 games, that will at least compile and run under KDE 4 and are installed
> with KDE 4.  Maybe we also include a notice that says "work in progress" or
> "no longer supported" with each old one.  I do not believe the "playground"
> idea will work, with respect to distros.  Playground is supposed to be for
> new, untried applications (e.g. Bovo?), AFAIK, so how is a distro to know
> that some of them are "old and tried"?  He will want to pick up KDE Games
> as a complete module, surely, not spend time picking and choosing games
> to distribute.

As the previous investigation shows, many of these old games are not 
playable right now, or are in a very poor state. Some distros (like 
opensuse) already include only 2 or 3 games in their default kdegames 
package, the ones that the distro considers in best shape. One way to 
change this situation imo is not to continue including games that are 
not working correctly, but instead concentrate on quality for the next 
release.
Of course, this plan does not work if users can not run the KDE3 
versions of the game anymore, this is a pre-condition for it.

> Rob Kaper announced that he would no longer maintain Atlantik years ago
> and went off to a new life with fewer computers in it IIRC: "gone walkabout",
> as the Australian aboriginals say.  Rob did a hell of a lot of work on it and
> I think it would be irresponsible of us to junk all that just because WE have
> decided to take on board radical changes to the libraries and game graphics
> and none of us is willing to "maintain" Atlantik.  This is a problem not of
> Rob's making, nor of the Atlantik players (I am NOT one - nor of KTron, BTW).
> 
> I think we owe it to the Atlantik and KTron players, provided there are more
> than a handful of them, to take collective responsibility for keeping these
> and other old games alive, even if we cannot SVGize and themeize them
> in the time available.  Just how we can handle that, I don't know.  Atlantik
> is huge, for example.  But we should try ...

We have been trying to find maintainers, but unfortunately there appears 
to be no interest for some games. At some point we will have to do 
something about it, and imo we should move forward with the plan 
outlined back in November: games that are unmaintained and broken were 
going to be removed from the main module.
If KDE3 games can not be made to run in a KDE4 environment (of course, 
the user will have to install libs, etc) then the old suggestion of 
creating a kdegames_classic or legacy module should be revisited, imo. 
This could be a good place for these ports that are not up to the 
standards defined for KDE4, but still work minimally well.

What do you think?

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini