[Kde-games-devel] GSoC 2010

[Matt Williams]

2010/1/27 Parker Coates <parker.coates at kdemail.net>:
> 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.

I agree with all you've said. I think we need to spend some time
polishing and perfecting our current suite of games and stop actively
going out looking for new ones. For this reason, if we were to take
part in GSoC then the only applications we would be likely to accept
would be proposals to improve current games or work on libkdegames.
However, given the relative 'importance' of kdegames compared with
other parts of the SC I feel that someone saying "I want to do some
random coding on game X" would have to be seen as secondary to someone
wanting to work on kdelibs. Working on libkdegames, however could be a
very valuable thing and we would be foolish to overlook that.

If we decide to go this route, it should be made clear that this
apparent 'turning down' of potential contributors is not done because
we don't want new contributors, but rather that we feel the limited
places in GSoC are better used by other parts of KDE. I just hope that
other KDE projects can be as honest as all this and think about how
much they need the places.

GSoC student assignment seems to be getting ever more political in KDE
(and I guess other projects) and I think we're doing the right thing
in being honest about our needs.

In summary: We should look for people to work on libkdegames and on
big feature additions to existing games (e.g. mulitplayer or AI) but
not for people to bring new games to us. I'd say about 2 slots at the
most.

-- 
Matt Williams
http://milliams.com