[Kde-games-devel] Rule writing, common data

[Parker Coates]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 15:21, Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> Hi,
>
> time for a small update on the Git move.
>
> 1. Someone moved the conversion progress from techbase to community,
> but did not mention this anywhere.

http://markmail.org/message/chz4drafmm4odyxj

> 2. Frederik, sometime ago you wrote about how to optimise the size of
> the repos with zero-compressed SVGZ and other black magic. I don't see
> that in the checklist on the wiki page I mentioned. Could you please
> explain there what to do for optimal repo size (and how to check for
> it as a reviewer)?

At this stage, the big worry is rule-writing. Recompressing images to
reduce repo size is a post-processing step, and only really matters on
the final conversions. Anyway, I've taken Nicolás' script, added PNG
recompression and try to make it more distributable. I'll push it to
the kde-ruleset repository soon.

> 3. What will happen with common data shared by multiple games? I'm
> talking about the carddecks and the Mahjongg tilesets and backgrounds,
> which are currently in the libkdegames and libkmahjongg directories.
> Should these stay with the libraries, or end up in a separate
> repository? If so, it might be a good idea to move them to
> trunk/kdegames/data/ now to clarify this.
>
> 4. I just see that libkmahjongg already has rules. I consider this
> problematic. As far as I can see, the usecase of libkmahjongg is just
> a specialization of KGameTheme and KGameThemeSelector.

Personally, I see no reason not to keep libkmahjongg as is, at least
for the time being. It's true that the classes in it aren't
particularly interesting, but it's nice that only the mahjonng tile
games depend on the mahjongg tile data.

> I therefore plan to abandon the concept of a separate libkmahjongg altogether

No offense, but I'm not sure you're in a position to determine the
future of the library. Wolfgang and Frederik (and Christian) actively
maintain apps that make use of it, so I think the decision is theirs
to make.

> and use the new KgTheme class which will definitely be in 4.9 for this.

Again, I don't want to be contrary, but I'm hesitant about so much
stuff depending on non-existent for the 4.9 release, especially since
your availability has been pretty low recently. The git conversion is
already eating up quite a bit of developer effort, so plans that are
too ambitious with respect to new code make me nervous.

> With this in mind, it's probably not useful to start out with a
> libkmahjongg repo now and then move the data files into libkdegames or
> into the separate data repo (see point 3).

Again, I'm thinking the opposite. It's probably not useful to start
moving libkmajongg stuff around now, when it could just as easily
happen once things have settled after the git conversion. Of course,
that's just my opinion.

> P.S. I'll try to get my hands dirty on rules for my own games in the
> meantime, but won't promise anything here.

That'd be helpful. They should be pretty simple to do.

Parker