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

[Max Horn]

Am 20.03.2004 um 23:26 schrieb Tore Anderson:

> * James 'Ender' Brown
>
>> My hope is to do a 0.6.1 release within a month, and 1.0 within three
>> months.
>>
>> Could people please post items they believe need to be seen to for 
>> these
>> releases? Remember the goal of 1.0 is full LucasArts SCUMM support
>> without some of the more annoying niggly bugs around at the moment.
>
>   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.
>  I've had numerous requests to implement this behaviour in the Debian
>  package, though I'm reluctant to make the Debian package's behavour
>  deviate from that of standard distribution build.

OK, file a feature request then!

I am a bit puzzled about that particular location you suggest, but if 
that is the debian standard, well, fine... For OSX, it'd could be 
"~/Library/Application Support/ScummVM/saves/" I guess


>
>   Another thing would be to have some standardized location for 
> site-wide
>  installation of games, which ScummVM would scan at startup to see if 
> it
>  found any matching games, and if so add them to the chooser menu
>  automagically.  To avoid auto detection problems, the game ID could be
>  encoded into the directory, for instance 
> /usr/share/scummvm/games/queen/
>  for FOTAQ, etc.  This would make the games more easily accessible for
>  users who run "apt-get install beneath-a-steel-sky" or something.
>
I am still opposed to adding such a feature.

As I understand it, the main motivations are:
1) Make it easier to add a debian package beneath-a-steel-sky". Well... 
that's not something I am really concerned about... installing BASS 
manually isn't that hard now either. So while I see the bonus, it seems 
rather small to me...
2) Make it easier to have the installation shared by many users
  This is actually the primary reason I am opposed. A site wide 
installation for the freeware'd games like BASS is of course fine. But 
it would automatically also work for the other games, and those are not 
freeware, and a site-wide use in most cases will be illegal. Granted, 
people could use it legally; like if you use it, and your family. But 
then, it shouldn't be a big problem to keep 2-5 scummvm config files in 
sync, and after all, you aren't adding new games that often, are you? I 
can't imagine anybody having more people share that config and still 
doing it legally. OTOH I can imagine many scenarios were people use it 
illegally.
3) Anything else? Enlighten me...

ScummVM is a game, for end users, for single user setups. It's used in 
most cases with non-free data files. Support for server setups is 
beneficial only to a very small portion of our users. OTOH it's easy to 
imagine illegal setups benefiting from such "site-wide" support.

Any feature in ScummVM which benefits illegal use, and benefits only a 
few legal users (and that in a very limited way), is in my eyes 
suspicious. That's also why I am opposed to adding support for playing 
games directly from .zip files (a la PhysFS), which has been suggested 
in the past.


Bye,

Max