Reviving KSokoban releases, next week already 8)

[Ian Wadham]

Hello Friedrich,

> On 24 Aug 2022, at 9:35 am, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau <kossebau at kde.org> wrote:

> in case there are still some (passive) KDE Games community members here, I 
> should keep you in the loop I guess :)
> 
> Last week, while updating code using API I had deprecated myself in KDE 
> Frameworks, I came across the KSokoban repo (invent.kde.org/games/ksokoban). 
> And while I remember that game from early KDE days, but not being much into 
> gaming the last decade, I was surprised to see that the code was fairly up-to-
> date and the program actually usable, yet there had not been a release for 
> more than 14 (sic!) years, the last one at KDE3 times.
> 
> Which saddened me, all the efforts done by all the people all the years, yet 
> no easy usage of the product for everyone.
> Well, besides Gentoo user as https://repology.org/project/ksokoban hints;)

I was around in those days on the KDE Games team. The transition from KDE 3
to KDE 4 was extremely difficult. Several games feel by the wayside - not just
KSokoban. Some major ones were KPoker, KBackgammon and KSirtet (a
Tetris-like game). Essentially it had been resolved that all the games needed
to have their graphics code re-written and their artwork re-created in SVG
(Scalable Vector Graphics). We had 20 or more people working on this,
including some artists, but not enough to to convert all of the games. KBlocks
eventually replaced KSirtet.

I guess KSokoban got dropped because its graphics was based on Povray, but
we had resolved to “standardise” on Qt4, SVG and QGraphicsView and nobody
understood the KSokoban code and graphics well enough to make the change.

> First read up a bit on the history in the ML archive, to understand why things 
> are where they are. And for what I understand, the main issue was the non-
> scaling UI, and then the lack of fully dedicated maintainer to get things 
> done, either by a replacement app like Magazynier or QML Sokoban (found on 
> store.kde.org) or by doing the hard work to port KSokoban codebase to 
> libkdegames API and get respective scaling graphic material.

Correct.

> Long term I would like to see KSokoban joining most of the other KDE games as 
> part of the KDE Gear release effort, ideally already starting with 2KDE Gear 
> 2.12. Feedback on the 0.5.* releases should help here.

Thank you very much for your work on this, Friedrich. I think a lot of people
would welcome such a release. It was a very good game!!!

All the best,
Ian Wadham.