---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Ancell <rob...@gm...>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:14:21 +1300
Subject: glChess rework
To: glc...@so..., ad...@su..., ro...@su...,
ku...@su..., sb...@su..., da...@wi...
Hi all,
I'm the original developer of glChess and I'm writing to you guys to
propose the future of the project...
I'm constantly suprised by the success of the project! Being my first
serious open source project (and basically just chosen as a test
project to get used to sourceforge) it's gone a long way. Of course
there seems to have been no activity for a long time! I still get bug
reports every month or so to my sf.net email but I don't generally
have time to follow them up.
I've been working as a design engineer for the last two years.
Unfortunately I had some RSI/OSI problems in my first year due to the
amount of typing at work and I had to give up most of my work on open
source :( However I have got that under control and as I have a 3 week
holiday coming up I plane to work on glChess 1.0. Of course it's
summer here in New Zealand so I'll be outside for at least 2 weeks of
it!
In my job I've got a lot of experience working on and with open source
and I'm confident I can rework glChess in a relatively short time
(famous last words!). At the time I didn't want to have glChess depend
on gnome, not everyone had it installed (due to space and having to
download it, these were the days of dial up internet!). But now
everyone at least has the libs installed and I'm now a big fan of
Gnome (sorry KDE I think you got passed :P).
Some of you I found from rpmfind.net. If there are more appropriate
packaging people please forward this message to them. It seems like
you guys have put a lot of work into packaging glChess (50 versions in
SuSE!). I use Debian so I don't have much experience with RPMs but I'm
keen for it to support it. If you guys want CVS access or can provide
patches to provide the RPM build process/desktop files/etc I'm keen
for these to go into the official version. Anything suggestions that
makes life easier for packagers are welcome!
So in summary in the next month I hope to release (at least) glChess
0.9. I don't have time for any planning as such so I'll just do it and
put it on CVS. The new webpage will be done using drupal so it should
be easier for anyone who wants to continue to work on the project to
post suggestions/status.
The proposed changes are:
- Making glChess a gnome application, i.e. all configuration done using gconf
- Upgrade to GTK+ 2.4/2.6
- Statically linking in libglass - its a small lib and seems to be a
big problem with people compiling the app
- Get rid of automake - this is where I need your opinions! I find
automake just makes projects unnecessarily complex
- UI done using glade
- Updated web page using drupal; I want to give the right impression
on the amount of support that can be provided to the project, i.e.
send in bug reports by all means and I'll/we'll do my/our best to fix
them!
- Deb package
Merry Christmas!
--Robert Ancell
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