[Scummvm-devel] Re: ScummVM release schedule / plans

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Sun Mar 21 06:11:02 CET 2004


Am 21.03.2004 um 02:49 schrieb Tore Anderson:

> * Tore Anderson
>
>>  Although not serving the goal of full SCUMM support, one of the
>> things I'd like to see most is that save games and such are saved to
>> a pre-defined directory under $HOME (~/.local/share/scummvm/?) instead
>> of $PWD.
>
> * Max Horn
>
>> OK, file a feature request then!
>
>   Didn't I just?  ;-)
>
>   (I've been meaning to for a long time, though, just haven't gotten 
> around
>  to it yet.)

I know you were kidding, but seriously: mailing us or writing something 
on IRC gets you nowhere; user your feature request tracker if you want 
your wish to stick around.
In this particular case, there is already a TODO entry; but an 
additional FR definitely won't hurt :-)


>> I am a bit puzzled about that particular location you suggest, but if
>> that is the debian standard, well, fine...
>
>   It's not Debian's standard, but freedesktop.org's - a project that
>  attempts to standardise how desktop applications work on *NIX.  
> Doesn't
>  matter to me, though, ~/.scummvm/ would be just as fine, but as fd.o
>  seems to have a fairly high adoption rate it may soon be the de-facto
>  standard it could probably be worth-while trying to adhere to it.

Ah OK, fine! I just was curious to learn where that comes from. I know 
about freedesktop.org (well, I know generally what it is, I don't know 
every single of their specs as you noticed :-), so that reasoning makes 
perfect sense to me.

[...
]
>   The BASS package has been in Debian for quite a while already.

Fine.

[...]

>
>   I think you're blowing this way out of proportion.
>
>   I believe you're wrong when you say that "site-wide use in most cases
>  will be illegal".  I think the typical "family" installation is much
>  more likely to be common than the "server" installation you speak of.

"The typical family installation on a Unix (or rather, debain box) 
which is configured for multiple users who all want to play BASS via 
ScummVM" first off is an very *atypical* thing, and secondly, the 
typical family affected by this on avarages has less than 5 members. So 
maintaining those 5 ScummVM config files is hardly a tough job.

OTOH, the number of typical uni installations (in my personal 
experience) which has games installed in a shared fashion so that 
everybody can play them is sadly not that atypical, and with a dozen or 
more users, this added ease-of-use indeed becomes a great bonus.


>   My impression of the typical warez junkie is that he downloads stuff 
> of
>  the net and installs it on his personal workstation to play.  When he
>  aids others to do the same thing, he uploads it to his friends or
>  whatever through diverse file transfer protocols.  I don't see how
>  supporting system-wide game installations will aid these actions nor
>  spur them to happen more frequently.

Not this type of illegal use, that wasn't the one I was thinking about 
(what you describe is the warez dude who would benefit from PhyFS-style 
support of playing games from a .zip file, BTW).


>   Also, it's worth noting that the packages of the free games (such as
>  the Debian beneath-a-steel-sky one) generally install the games into
>  system-wide locations.

I already stated that I see no problem with BASS being installed in a 
site wide location. The ScummVM user than has to start ScummVM, press 
"Add Game", select the BASS path, and that's it. Clearly more work than 
a fully automated setup, but OTOH easy enough for anybody to do with 
the help of three lines of instructions:
   To use the BASS package, start ScummVM. You will find yourself in the
   "Launcher" dialog. Choose "Add Game". This opens a file selector. 
Browse
   to "/debians/path/to/bass/", and click "OK". Press "OK" again. Done

OK, should probably make it a bit more verbose, but the above is enough 
to do the job.


>   All of those users will benefit from having
>  ScummVM automatically find the available games,

Err, that's not a feature you were suggesting. It would require 
scanning all connected HDs / file systems. You are suggesting a feature 
which would make a user's ScummVM find all games installed in a certain 
"site-wide" fashion.


>  and I believe that a
>  significant number of users have installed that package[0].  At the
>  very least, they're many more than the "only a few" you suggest.
See below for my reply to that claim :-)

>  For what it's worth, it is on behalf of those users I request the
>  feature.
>
>   I don't think it's an important feature worth spending a lot of time
>  on, but it would be nice to have, that's all.

The difficulty of implementing it isn't the issue, it wouldn't be too 
hard. But I am still opposed to it.

>
>   [0]  http://popcon.debian.org/ shows the BASS package with a
>        installation count of 89.  The highest installation count of
>        any package is 2675, which we may assume is present on every
>        Debian system.  If we invent the fact that there's a total of
>        267500 Debian systems world-wide, we may conclude[1] that
>        there's 8900 Debian systems which have BASS installed in a
>        system-wide and legit manner.
>   [1]  Of course, that is just ludicrous.  But you do get my point?  :)

Actually, no. I am a mathematician, and I have to turn away in horror 
when I see such abuse of statistics :-). Even if there were a total of 
27 million debian systems, then there still may be only 180 of them who 
have the BASS package. Tell me the correlation between people who have 
BASS installed and who have POPCON installed, after we have an estimate 
for that we can start to think about deriving proportions from the 
above numbers (including error ranges)... before that, the computation 
is totally bogus.

Besides, even *that* number wouldn't tell us about how many of those 
people would benefit from an easy site-wide installation, rendering 
that number even less useful.
Of some interest might be to learn the number of people who want this 
site-wide feature, divided by the number of people who have 
ScummVM+BASS installed via Debian (or even who have installed ScummVM 
on a Unix in any way... but I want to be fair, so let's count the 
bigger number :-). Of course you can't know that, but a very rough and 
bad approximation would be to count the number of requests you 
received, divided by 89... of course it's still quite bogus, since we 
don't know how "having popcon installed" correlates with "being 
somebody who voices feature wishes actively, instead of just passively 
wanting them", but if we use as a conjecture that this number is high, 
we can derive at least a little meaning from it.



Bye,

Max





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