[Scummvm-devel] Evolution of Scummvm-tools

[Arnaud Boutonné]

Hi everybody,

First of all, I'd like to present you my best wishes for 2016! And, as
usual, my more specific wishes of good health and eternal youthfulness :)

I have added those last days a couple of tools in scummvm-tools to compress
the audio of Tony Tough, and I found scummvm-tools in a very bad shape,
particularly for MSVC users for whom the compilation was completely broken.
With the help of criezy and m_kiewitz, it now compiles with MSVC2008, but
it's still broken for other versions of MSVC.

But that's only a part of the problem. My main issue at this point is that
the Common code it's currently using is extremely obsolete, which results
in the use of multiple unsafe functions that are currently forbidden in
Scummvm/Master by the use of common/forbidden.h. As it's missing a lot of
other basic stuff, a lot of code is duplicated uselessly like the code in
Common/utils, the required audio decoders, etc.

I started looking at what would be the consequences of using a common
Common code, and just fixing the compilation is already quite a large work
so I'd like to discuss that before starting something which may be rejected
or severely criticized at the end. And that's even without considering the
likely regressions we may experience after some code refactoring.

I know there have been historical reasons for splitting apart the
scummvm-tools, typically because they are user-oriented at the opposite of
the devtools which are developer-oriented.
Does it still make sense to keep them in a different repository, rotting
silently? I have been poked by users trying to compile the tools and unable
to do so, so I think that at least the user-oriented approach failed for
that matter...

So my question is: could we consider to put the user tools in Master, after
making them compatible with the current Common code? and if not, is there a
git mechanism (criezy mentioned sub-tree) we could use, along with some
good coding practices?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts

Best regards
Arnaud
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.scummvm.org/pipermail/scummvm-devel/attachments/20160105/274afa95/attachment.html>