[Kde-games-devel] Kolf: Rumours of its death have been much exaggerated

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

I have just committed a fix to Kolf on trunk/kdegames/kolf.

The only problem seems to have been that ::openFile() in
kolf/game.cpp relies on the list of groups in the Course
file being sorted, so that all groups for one hole appear in
sequence.  Otherwise, it gives up after reading and loading
the first group.

The group names are of the form
[<hole-number>-<object-name>@<x>,<y>|<id>], where
<object-name> is "cup", "ball", "slope", etc.  So no wonder
things looked bad if only one object per hole was being
loaded and painted !!!

I am unsure whether kolf/game.cpp, line 2740, should ask for
KConfig::SimpleConfig, so I have left it as KConfig::NoGlobals.
It seems to make no difference in this case.

Stefan, Mauricio or whoever, please can you try out this fix.

If it is OK and there are no further problems, the fix should
be backported to the KDE 4.3 branch.  Would you like me
to do that?

Stefan, I am not sure where you are up to in discussions
with release-team at kde.org and kde-core-devel at kde.org.
I am not subscribed to either list.  Someone should tell
them the news.

I am CCing you, Stefan and Mauricio, because I am getting
only my own stuff back on kde-games-devel.  I can only
assume you have not seen my "Hope for Kolf" posts ... ;-)

Also has anyone tried out the latest KGoldrunner sounds?
I am waiting to backport them to the KDE 4.3 branch.

BTW and on another topic really, my fix to Kolf poses some
interesting questions about "semantic drift" in libraries.

As I mentioned on another thread, I have KDE 4.2, KDE 4.3,
Qt 4.4 and Qt 4.5 all installed in my dev setup and I can mix,
match and compare.  Without that, I would not have had no
hope of finding this bug in Kolf.

In KDE 4.2, the KConfig::groupList() functions delivers
group names in sorted order in a QStringList, but in KDE 4.3
the names are not sorted, even if they were in the actual file,
as is the case in Kolf's Course files.

In Qt 4.4, QStringList::sort() returns another QStringList,
whereas in Qt 4.5 it is VOID.  I thought that kind of thing is
not supposed to happen in Qt.  With the Qt 4.5 ::sort(), I am
assuming that it sorts the current QStringList in situ, but the
doco does not actually spell that out ...

Of course, it was wrong of Kolf's author to assume the group
names were sorted --- or maybe that was a documented
feature in KDE 3(?), when Kolf was written.  I would say
the assumption is excusable, though.  So much of the time,
in KDE, one has to second-guess what a library-function does
--- or try to read the code --- because the doco may be brief.

The alternative is not to use that KDE function unless you
absolutely have to.

All the best, Ian W.