[Kde-games-devel] Re: RFC: git move proposal; "duolithic" kdegames

[Ian Wadham]

On Thursday 03 March 2011 9:31:12 am Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> I've been thinking about the Git move again. I'm still in favor of the
> monolithic approach for organizational reasons<snip>
> 
> The executive summary is:
> 1. A new module kdegames-data is created into which all binary data
> files are moved. kdegames-data is declared to have a build-time
> dependency on kdegames.
> 2. Applications are modified such that they can work without the data
> (as in: they won't crash). If that's not possible or not reasonable,
> simple dummy data files are included with the source code which ensure
> that kdegames can run standalone.
> 3. kdegames moves to Git while kdegames-data stays in SVN. Because the
> history of kdegames would include the data files and therefore nullify
> all the efforts, the kdegames Git repository starts from scratch with
> a simple source code import. The existing monolithic rules are used to
> create a kdegames-history repository which contains the history until
> the moment of the Git move.
> 
I am broadly in favor of all this, except I'd rather not move to yet another
source-code control system, but who am I to stand in the way of progress?

I have rarely if ever found the diffs on data files useful and they do not
seem to change much, except for new files or changes of format.  The
history of data files is occasionally useful, e.g. to track down when a data
files was created or released.  So if the data files stayed in SVN, that would
be fine by me.

I tend to think the same way about the documentation files in doc/, i.e. re
diffs and history.

Eyeballing some of my code, I found that 2. above should already be satisfied
and the code should issue appropriate error messages.

I am not so keen on 1. above.  If there is no dependency from games to data
(not even a warning?), how is a newcomer or a non-games person building
from source supposed to know that data exists and where to find it?
Without such data, the compiled games could be a big turnoff IMO.

All the best, Ian W.