[Kde-games-devel] README.PACKAGERS

[Parker Coates]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 20:17, Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> These are only *suggestions* to packagers anyway, the main idea is not
> to artificially limit the amount of games we accept in the kdegames
> directory in order to please minimalistic distros.

Do we really think these suggestions will make any difference? I mean
if I had my own distro, I would certainly package all of KDEGames, but
when it came to picking the games installed by default I'd include
KPat, KMines and a personal favourite or two. I don't think the
module's suggestions would have any real weight.

If anything, I think we (as a module) need to recognise that we're
very different from the other KDE module in that we're not subject to
their single application per task policy. KDEGraphics contains only
one document viewer, one screenshot taker, one simple image editor,
etc. When Okular became the default document view for KDE4, Ligature
was kicked out of the module.

This doesn't really apply to us since all our applications fill only
one goal: distraction and entertainment. Sure you could narrow down
that goal into more categories, but eventually the have to get very
specific. (At one point we had both Klickety and KSame in the module!
Try to argue that those two fill different user needs.) As a result
KDEGames continues to grow and, based on the state of playground, will
continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

I think we have to consider ourselves as more of a collection of
friendly games than a single package that you install to get "game"
functionality. At our current size, it seems quite unlikely that any
distro would install our entire module by default, so maybe we should
be emphasising our pick-and-choose-ability.

If we do go ahead with classifying our games, I would recommend
containing the groups and the apps contained in them in a single
module level file rather than spreading the data around to a bunch of
one line text files. The current setup makes it hard to get an
overview.

Parker