[Kde-games-devel] [Fwd: Re: kbackgammon]

[Matt Williams]

On Wednesday 21 May 2008 00:19:41 Ian Wadham wrote:
> On Tue, 20 May 2008 04:56 pm, Alexander Smirnov wrote:
> > Date: 	Mon, 19 May 2008 10:18:34 -0700
> > From: 	Daren Sawkey <daren at sawkey.net>
> > It's good to hear you are interested in patching and maintaining
> > kbackgammon. Please go ahead. You are right, I have no time for it now.
> >
> > I seem to recall the main problem I had was the with fibs. The graphics
> > needed to be ported to qt4, but somehow that would interfere with fibs.
> > I don't remember the details. I did write a qt4 based backgammon program
> > without fibs, but the kdegames crowd wanted to keep kbackgammon with
> > fibs. Makes it odd that they've gotten rid of kbackgammon entirely now
> > though...
>
> Not at all ... in fact the boot is on the other foot.  KDE Games was one of
> the few modules that did get a lot of applications into the KDE 4.0 release
> (about 24 of them if I recall) and that was of great value to the core
> developers during the launch of KDE 4.0 (I've heard *that* from the
> horse's mouth).  Otherwise what demos would they have shown people?
>
> As the deadline approached, we had to get tough about what would be
> in the release and what would not, and it was essential that each game
> should have somebody working on it at the time.  If any one of us had
> had the time or the experience to step in and take over work on
> KBackgammon, me included, we would have.  It is an important member
> of the KDE Games set and one of the World's classic games.
>
> Daren, your work on getting it as far as you did is deeply appreciated
> and will provide an excellent foundation for Alexander's work.
>
> KBackgammon will ride again!  Thanks to you and Alexander.  And,
> of course, it is still active in KDE 3.5, and that version can be run in
> KDE 4.0.
>
> All the best, Ian W.

Exactly. You shouldn't think of the "kdegames team" as some sort of evil 
overlord, stamping on the games beneath it (if only... :P). But rather, it's 
the people who write the games who are in control; there's no one who has 
more real power than anyone else. That said, it's the maintainer of each 
individual game who is responsible for making decisions about features etc.

It was a decision made by everyone (during a few of our monthly IRC meetings 
[1]) that releasing a game which wasn't fully maintained would be damaging. 
It was a really hard decision to make to drop any of the games and we really 
were trying to get maintainers for them (there were dot articles [2] and 
everything). The fact that you are here willing to help is exactly the thing 
we need to get this fantastic game back on track.

Regards,
Matt Williams

[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games/IRC_Meeting
[2] http://dot.kde.org/1178370429/
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