[Kde-games-devel] GSoC 2010

[Parker Coates]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:38, Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Lydia's message to kde-soc@ reminded me that it's that time of the year again,
> when we need to think about whether/how we want to participate in Google
> Summer of Code.
>
> Last year was a quite successful year in the number of kdegames projects that
> were funded, but not so much when it comes to the actual outcome. At least, I
> haven't seen any activity on Mancala, Parsek, and Kolf lately. Regarding the
> last one: mea culpa. Kolf has had unexpected problems in its overall design,
> which completely messed up the schedule and such for the GSoC project.
>
> Apart from these special problems, we need to investigate now what went wrong
> and how we can do better this year. I think a big factor in this is
> communication: No one of our three students of last year is writing on this
> mailing list anymore, and I remember only Zeng writing at least one or two
> times, which I attribute to my poking. Situation on IRC is similar, although I
> cannot comment on this point very good because I'm hardly ever using IRC, too.
>
> A second possible issue is that kdegames is not a united big project like
> Plasma or Amarok, it's more of a coordinated effort to create multiple
> applications. Big parts of our codebase are maintained by only one person. In
> such an environment, it's harder for newbies to become part of the community.
> (I hope you get my point here.)
>
> So, RFC: What can we do to make this year's GSoC a success? And the second
> question: Are there any project ideas?
>
> Actually, I have a project idea, but I have to leave now.

Personally, I'm thinking that maybe KDEGames should pass on GSoC this
year. It was great that we got so many slots last year, but as you
mentioned the overall outcome wasn't great. It might be wise to give
this summer's slots to KDE subprojects that could better put them to
use.

KDEGames has reached a bit of an awkward point. The community in
general is pretty inactive. We have a lot of games in SVN, but very
few active maintainers. I fear using GSoC to add more games to the
module will only result in more abandonware. The work that really
needs done is polishing/bug fixing/maintenance of our existing games,
but my understanding is that such work isn't really eligible for a
GSoC because it has hard to define goals and isn't terribly sexy.
(Which makes sense, I think.)

Now of course, if someone has a great suggestion for a project that
would improve the quality of our current code base, then we should
certainly consider it.

Parker