[Kde-games-devel] Re: introducing synchrotron

[Josef Spillner]

Am Mittwoch, 5. Januar 2011, 21:37:02 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> i wasn't aware hotstuff was still active or even an option. last time we
> talked about these things, the hotstuff server wasn't ready for this kind
> of thing, and tbh, perl is really not my cup of tea. not that PHP is,
> either, but i can sling it with a bit more ease.

I see, so the issue extends to the lack of communication on my side. 
Acknowledged.

Regarding scripting languages, the first iteration of hotstuff scripts was even 
written in PHP, but its XML and web service capabilities at that time were 
poor. AFAIK they changed the DOM API around three times back then, whereas 
Perl made great buzz about SOAPLite which is now mostly dead. To be honest, 
all major scripting languages that I regularly use (including Python and Ruby) 
are still weak in this area. This is a major obstacle to FLOSS service 
development. I have a (work-related) long text document outlining pros and 
cons of all sorts of toolkits, perhaps I should turn this into an article :)

> if hotstuff can be made to do precisely what i need (namely: to turn a
> bunch of directories in a git repo into a set of feeds; zip compression
> and reading metadata from .desktop files are critical features for the
> plasma content) and is easily installed and maintained somewhere we can
> use, i'm happy to drop synchrotron like a hot potato.

Turning .desktop files into .meta files is not part of the scripts per se but 
there are some additional scripts to extract e.g. translations from .desktop 
files. They would need to be extended to cover your plasma needs indeed. The 
automatic zipping is also a neat feature, although I thought that the version 
control systems' web interfaces nowadays all provide this function to download 
on-demand snapshots of parts of the repo and that it should be used instead to 
avoid storage overhead. Will look into it.

> i don't need to maintain yet another project. i do need the functionality
> it provides and it was quite easy to write it. as a result i have
> precisely what i need in very little time.

Having yet another resource-consuming project and yet another documentation 
path split at techbase for new developers is at the centre of my worries. From 
a process point of view I'd say this should further be discussed at the GHNS 
mailing list at fd.o, if you're ok with me taking over features from you or 
you volunteering to replace my scripts (& hosting).

Josef

P.S. Lack of communication, hm, a small anecdote in lieu of a proper blog 
entry: During my remaining holidays, though not active as developer or 
researcher, I continue to be a heavy KDE user in a "one new tool per day" 
learning mode. This is something that I can recommend to everybody. Currently, 
I'm amazed by the video editing capabilities of kdenlive. This tool is vastly 
under-marketed, it even attracts non-technical people to KDE :)