KGoldrunner silenced in KDE 4.6 RC1

[Ian Wadham]

Hello Release Team,

I wish to notify you officially that I have (temporarily I hope) removed the
Sound feature of the KGoldrunner game from trunk/KDE/kdegames using
SVN revision 1207699 on 19 Dec 2010.  I see that the change is now in the
KDE 4.6 RC1 tag.

I feel that removing an entire feature at this late stage in the release cycle
is rather a drastic and rule-breaking action to take, however I do not think
there was anything else I could do.

See the recent thread "Sound problems in KGoldrunner" on the KDE Games
list for details.  Basically, Phonon in KGoldrunner does not work for me, with
trunk as at 30 June.  It works with up-to-date trunk for Andreas Pakulat but
freezes up everything when the game starts for Parker Coates.  There is
also recently reported https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260262 for
KDE 4.3 KGoldrunner, where Phonon/Xine crashed amid a huge tangle
of threads.

I wrote to the KDE Games release co-ordinator on 21 Dec but had no reply.

At the moment I feel powerless to do anything about this problem between
now and the KDE 4.6 release, so I am also looking for leads and people
who can help.

Knowing I was going to be away overseas and out of Internet contact for
a while, I finished my changes early for the 4.6 release and have been
inactive on KDE and not receiving email lists for several months, so I
am currently completely out of touch.  Specifically:

 - I no longer know for sure how to build Qt and KDE - much has changed.

 - I do not know for sure how to build and install Phonon.  I think you are
   supposed to install the Qt version then somehow install the KDE version
   over the top of it (i.e. under $QTDIR) ... ???

 - I have no idea how Phonon works, so I have no idea how to investigate
   the problem with it in KGoldrunner.  It's a library and I am an application
   developer, so I expect it to "just work".

 - Somebody else wrote the code for KGoldrunner's sound feature, back
   in 2008.  It has never worked excellently for everybody and I believe the
   Phonon authors have said that Phonon was never designed for use in games.

Can you give me any ideas or put me in touch with anyone who could help?

Best regards, Ian Wadham,
Melbourne, Australia.