[Scummvm-devel] Status of ScummVM Android port

Angus Lees alees at google.com
Thu Mar 10 01:11:01 CET 2011


Ergh. I didn't even see this thread until just now, which isn't a good sign.

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 01:17, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:
> Am 03.03.2011 um 14:45 schrieb A Milburn:
> > On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 02:22:20PM +0100, Andre Heider wrote:
> >> comparing it to a nighly, i'd say we're closing in ;) the missing big
> >> thing is an overhaul of the input system.
> >
> > I have been testing the nightlies after Andre's changes on a few different
> > Android devices and it seems to work quite well now.

Sigh, I need to get me some more devices.  The 1.2.x release also
works on everything I have access to - including an Android 3.0 xoom
tablet that I borrowed from a colleague a few days ago.

> Great to hear that. And many thanks to Andre for the status update and his recent work :).

Indeed, Andre has my thanks also :)

> I am not familiar with the Android Market, but would it be possible to register a "ScummVM Team" vendor account or something like that, for which the "keys" are shared between some key personnel (e.g. Angus, Andre, and the team leads; the latter for backup) ? How is the current ScummVM version distributed, is it on a personal account by Gus, or what?

So there are two important aspects to the "ownership" of the package:

1. Keys used to sign the apk

An apk can be cleanly upgraded if the keys on the old/new apks match.
If we change keys, users need to remove/reinstall the package (losing
settings, etc) which is something we should probably avoid.

The keys I've currently been using to sign the apk are sitting on my
laptop, and "sharing" them should be as simple as copying them around
to other devs (securely, of course).

Foolishly I didn't create a dedicated key for ScummVM in the
beginning, but I don't think I've used that key for anything more than
personal experiments, so I'm fine with opening it up further.

2. Market account

The Android market account is used for distributing the apks via that
channel (ie: irrelevant for direct downloads from scummvm.org, etc).
I don't think there is any notion of shared owners so we would need to
create a dedicated group account and share the login/password amongst
interested devs.
The market account allows you to post updates, change the description,
screenshots, see user comments and some simple "number of installs"
statistics.
It costs US$25 to create a market account (but no further charges for
upload, etc after that).

I'm not sure how awkward market will be about shifting the packages
from my personal market account.  At worst, I delete it and reupload it
under the new account.  This would lose star-ratings, comments and
install counts (bad for app prominence in market search results, but
otherwise ok).  Devices shouldn't care - at the end of the day they
just fetch a package by name and verify the signature - the market
owner isn't important.

I can ask around to see if there is some trick to preserving market
metadata across owner changes - so don't rush into this step.

> > And even updating it to
> > the 1.2.1 version would still be a pretty bad user experience, without Andre's
> > fixes, due to things like the threading issues with BASS and the issues with
> > engines providing nonsense focus rectangles.
>
> Well, seems we need to get a new release out soon then ;).
>
> Maybe it would even make sense to backport the recent changes to the 1.2.x branch ? Or are the differences too big ? (THe recent palette RGBA -> RGB changes come to mind a blocker, but other than that... ?)

One of the things you will quickly realise if you start reading
comments / user mail is that your average Android market user isn't
used to the usual free software process and has a high level of
impatience and general technical ignorance.  With this in mind, I have
been (and was expecting to continue) backporting fixes / holding off
releases as appropriate to address identified Android problems,
without limiting myself to waiting for official releases of ScummVM.

In other words:  I think whatever market update should include Andre's
recent fixes.  I'd suggest doing a cherrypick of those patches into a
special Android-market-release-specific build/branch or a new formal
1.2.x release - depending on how offensive people think the former is.

 - Gus




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