[Kde-games-devel] How to use KNewStuff3?

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Josef,
Thanks very much for responding.  I was about to give up hope
and abandon the whole idea of using KNewStuff3 in KGoldrunner.

On Thursday 17 June 2010 10:06:56 pm Josef Spillner wrote:
> my mail intents to shed some light on the issues you raised. Considering my
> current inactive situation, it comes with a disclaimer of probably being
> inaccurate or outdated. Nevertheless, GHNS should support everything an
> application developer wants regarding collaborative data exchange, and if
> something doesn't work right now it needs to be identified and compared
> against the conceptual design of the protocol and the KNS library.
> Therefore, I'm glad you point out some under-documented areas of how and
>  where to use GHNS.
> 
> Am Sonntag, 13. Juni 2010, um 02:03:44 schrieb Ian Wadham:
> <snip>
> >   - Where do I actually *store* the new stuff?  On SVN or where?
> 
> This depends on the GHNS provider. With the kde-files.org system, the data
>  is uploaded and maintained through a web interface. With newstuff.kde.org,
>  the data can be maintained in SVN (or maybe Git in the future if there is
>  a demand) as well as WebDAV and FTP. A web interface is only available in
>  read- only mode because so far there doesn't seem to be a demand for full
>  management functionality over the web.
> 
So I gather that newstuff.kde.org is read-only unless you have a SVN account.
That's fine.

> >   - What guarantee do I have of continuity of space and URL?
> 
> If the data is not too large, you can use the newstuff.kde.org server for
> storage. We set it up so that it doesn't clutter the KDE SVN repositories.
>  It has some 4 GB free space and I'm sure we'll get more if needed. There
>  is versioning support available to guarantee stable URLs for access by
>  parallel KDE application releases, but this feature is admittedly not
>  really used much yet.
> 
No problem.  My biggest file is <0.5Mb.  It would be nice to be able to
put new collections of levels up before official release.  I think it is a
turn-off for contributors to have to wait till the next release to see
their work appear.

> >   - How do the users know where to find it?
> 
> The users shouldn't know where the data comes from (downloads) or goes to
> (uploads). Advanced users should be able to find it out for reasons of
>  desktop control and transparency, but most users don't care. They should
>  simple use the provided KNS classes and standard action to fetch or
>  transmit the data.
> speker
> >   - How do the users go about preparing and uploading stuff?
> 
> In KNS2, there was a generic upload wizard to specify the file, preview,
> licence and other metadata. The file and preview generation was
>  application- specific logic.
> There have been some changes in KNS3 regarding upload, and I haven't seen
> upload in action yet. Perhaps your game is a good prototype to test it :-)
> 
> >   - Where do you store the doco on formatting data, how to upload
> >     stuff and how to use stuff of various kinds?
> >   - How do the users know where to find the doco?
> 
> Partially in the manual (for end users) and partially on techbase, I'd say.
> 
OK, great.  Re uploading, at first I might have to vet contributions before
they are uploaded (e.g. to ensure that text follows guidelines for translation
and non-English reading).  A high-score bid would probably be submitted
by the end-user, whenever I get that far ...

> >   - What is the translation policy for text in new stuff?
> 
> There used to exist some scripts in Hotstuff SVN to convert between the
>  GHNS XML format and the desktop format understood by KDE's translation
>  system. If they're used somewhere is beyond my knowledge, but from an
>  academic point of view it's a solved problem ;)
> 
Released collections of KGoldrunner levels are in a pseudo C++ format,
so are easy to translate.  My question is more whether/how scripty,
translators or whatever look in a new stuff repository for translation work.

Thanks again for your help, Josef.  I might try new levels and solutions
as the first data-sets and see how I go.

All the best, Ian W.