[Kde-games-devel] Re: kpat solvers

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Parker,

On Wednesday 26 Jan 2011 18:36:55 Parker Coates wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 11:35, Parker Coates wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 10:24, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> >> On Wednesday 26 Jan 2011 10:49:49 Shlomi Fish wrote:
> >>> I've started working on integrating Freecell Solver into kpat and got
> >>> my patch in a working condition, but since then kpat was updated, and
> >>> furthermore, I was focusing on Freecell instead of Simple Simon.
> >> 
> >> Today I did a lot of further work on the patch, and it can now also be
> >> used for Simple Simon. You can find it at the temporary location of:
> >> 
> >> http://www.shlomifish.org/kpat-fc-solve/
> >> 
> >> There are many standing issues in the patch, such as duplicate code and
> >> some possible memory leaks, which I am aware of, but comments are
> >> welcome. I'd like to clean it up and put it up for review later on.
> > 
> > The only person really qualified to discuss technical issues
> > concerning the KPat solvers (and to accept or reject your patch) is
> > Stephan Kulow. He isn't subscribed to this list, so I've forwarded
> > your patch on to him. In the future, you may want to contact him
> > directly.
> > 
> > Personally, I guess my biggest question is: Is fc-solve not released
> > as packageable as a standalone library that KPat could link to?
> 
> Sorry, I meant "Is fc-solve not released as a packageable, standalone
> library that KPat could link to?"
> 

fc-solve is released as a packageable, standalone library that KPat (or any 
other program) can link to:

* http://fc-solve.berlios.de/

* http://fc-solve.berlios.de/docs/distro/INSTALL.html

* The license is MIT/X11 , the code is written in relatively portable ANSI C 
(32-bit and 64-bit compliant) and the build system is CMake, which is the same 
as KDE's (and in fact the transition of KDE to CMake inspired me to convert 
Freecell Solver from GNU Autotools to CMake .).

-----------

The reason I included the entire source in my patch was that back when fc-
solve was integrated as a solver for KPat back in time for KDE 2.1 (by Stephan 
Kulow), the source was included in the directory in order to not force a 
compile-time dependency on it. This remained the case up to and including 
KDE-3.5.x, after which Stephan decided to convert KPat to use Dr. Tom 
Holroyd's Patsolve instead. 

Maybe the policy of depending on external dependencies has changed since then, 
and I was not aware of it. In that case, it should not be hard to make the 
kdegames CMake build system make use of an existing libfreecell-solver.pc 
file, which I prepare and install. But I need to know if this is the 
acceptable path-of-action for everyone and you don't mind an extra external 
dependency on libfreecell-solver for build kpat. As far as I'm concerned, I 
will prefer that too instead of having the source included there.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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