[Kde-games-devel] libtagaro -> kdereview [-> kdegames]

[Stefan Majewsky]

Hi,

what is the technical procedure for moving libtagaro.git to kdereview?
I think sysadmins need be informed, and hope that those are reading
here.

Assuming that this goes well: I hereby propose to move libtagaro to
the kdegames module after the usual review period. For the time being,
because kdegames has not yet moved from SVN, this would create a
module that is split between SVN and Git, but a similar situation
exists with kdegraphics, so I hope this is not a problem. In any
event, scm-interest is CCd if anyone wants to discuss this.

Rationale: libtagaro intends to replace libkdegames in the long run.
libkdegames was developed long before such important technologies as
QGraphicsView, QML and OCS, which define how our games work now or in
the near future. Therefore, the scope of the support library that is
libkdegames changes rapidly.

Currently, libtagaro contains
1. an advanced version of KGameRenderer from libkdegames, which adds
some further optimization opportunities and flexibility
2. a simple sound effects API which, if possible, uses OpenAL to
reduce playback latency
3. some basic layouting components for QGraphicsView-based games

Not much of this is new in the kdegames codebase. Number 2 is already
used by Granatier (by means of a static source copy), number 3 is
already used by Kolf (in the same way). Number 1 is, as I said,
heavily based on KGameRenderer which is already used by about a dozen
games.

I want to add more components, especially to accommodate the needs of
mobile form factors, but doing so will be much easier when I can rely
on the games having a hard dependency on it. Previously, I planned to
make libtagaro a private library inside the module, but this approach
is unpractical while the rest of kdegames is still in SVN, or when
kdegames moves to Git with a split repository layout. I therefore plan
to install headers publicly, but explicitly state that there is no
API/ABI stability guarantee for the time being, i.e. SO versions will
likely be bumped often over the course of the next few 4.x releases.

I conclude my explanations with a braindump of what needs to be done:
* TagaroAudio falls back to Phonon when OpenAL is not available, but
the Phonon backend is not yet implemented. (Mathias Kraus of Granatier
helps with that.)
* No CMake find-script etc. is installed at the moment. AFAIK it would
be best to include this with the rest of the kdegames module. Also, it
is probably not state-of-the-art to detect libsndfile through
pkgconfig. Granatier has a FindSndfile.cmake which I plan to copy.
* I have not checked Krazy output for quite a while, though I think it
was empty some two months ago.

Greetings
Stefan