[Kde-games-devel] Time for me to retire from KDE Games

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

As near as I can judge, today is an important day for me.

In April 1964, I started my first job as a programmer and
the 6th of April 1964 was the first Monday in that month,
which is probably the date I started.

So … 50 years in programming!

Also it is just over 12 years since I made my first commit to
KDE Games ... the "kdenonbeta" version of KGoldrunner.
But I had been working on KGoldrunner for a while before
that, picking up the original version written by Marco Krüger.

As I announced a few months ago, it is now time for me to
retire from KDE Games.  I would like to go on programming
forever, but am mindful of a story I once heard about a very
famous solo classical musician.

He said, "If I miss practicing for a day, I notice my mistakes.
If I do not practice for two days, the conductor notices.  And
if I miss practicing for three days, the audience notices".

Programming requires some of the same mental skills as
playing classical music and I am finding those skills harder
to muster as I get older.  I am now 76 and beginning to "notice
my mistakes".  I do not wish to get to the stage where you and
the "audience" (the KDE Games players) notice them … :-)

At present I am responsible for five games:

    KGoldrunner - an arcade game
    Kubrick - a 3-D simulation of Rubik's Cube (™)
    KJumpingCube - a tactical board game
    KSudoku - Sudoku puzzles of various shapes and sizes
    Palapeli - a jigsaw puzzle game for 4 to 10,000 pieces

I am looking for people to take them over and maintain them.

I will not be leaving just yet.  I have just finished a major new
development in Palapeli for KDE 4.13 (support for large
puzzles, up to 10,000 pieces) and there are still some finishing
touches to do for KDE 4.14.  Also Inge Wallin and I will be
working on integrating his new AI library into KJumpingCube.
After that, I will not be undertaking any new developments.

Instead, I will be tidying up the 5 games and catching up on
bug reports, so that anyone taking over will receive as clean
a sheet as possible.

I think the maintenance of those 5 games will not be difficult or
time consuming, except perhaps for porting to KF5.

I always write lots of comments in my code and I do not get
many bug reports, except that there were (and still are) large
backlogs on KSudoku and Palapeli before I took over.  I hope
that I will be able to close a lot of those bugs with "fixed in" notices.

Another project I am getting involved in is to get KDE libraries
and applications into a more reliable working state on the
Apple OS X platform where I now work.  We are trying to muster
some support on this from key KDE guys on kde-devel and maybe
at the Randa meeting in August, see http://randa-meetings.ch/

BTW, I think all the KDE Games work fine on Apple OS X and I
enjoy playing some of them, but I have not yet tested all of them.

We have trouble with some of the big KDE apps and with some
internal things in KDE, such as Dr Konqui often not running when
a program crashes, the Help->Report Bug… dialog not appearing,
application icons not appearing and the Handbook generator
(meinproc4) crashing randomly during big builds.

I will still be around on this list after retiring, but only as a
"consultant" [1], not as a maintainer or developer.

I have really enjoyed my time with KDE Games.  It has been a
real pleasure to program just for fun and not on some project
nominated by a manager or necessitated by the sins of the past
(e.g. the Y2K project I was working on in 1998 before I quit work).

And there have certainly been some interesting and helpful
people pass through this list in the 12 years I have been on it.
My thanks go out to all of them for their help and their
comradeship.

All the best, Ian W.

[1] There is an old story about a bull who found out how to jump
the fence and get in amongst the cows in the next field.  One day
he had a nasty accident when jumping the fence ... so now he is
a consultant to the other bulls … :-)