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  • Going to have to find a Maintainer for OLPCGames (Can't keep doing it in my spare time...)

Going to have to find a Maintainer for OLPCGames (Can't keep doing it in my spare time...)
Written by on in Young Coders.


My "spare" time is rather thin on the ground these days. I'll have to see if I can find someone who can commit to maintain OLPCGames. It just takes way too much time, and since it's not considered part of my official work for the OLPC I'm having to slot it in among the dozens of other Open Source side projects clamouring for my attention.

I originally took OLPCGames up because it was a major application development stack for the project that was completely broken and needed to be fixed to be even minimally usable and let developers move forward. It's usable now (though we're seeing a few big issues just at this moment that I'll have to address short-term), but we need someone with the spare time to really sit and hack on the package.

As I'm working on the tutorial for Developers (and for PyCon) I'm fixing rather a lot of small issues with the package, but long term we need someone who's not just fixing a bug here or there when it jumps up in their face. We need someone who's working weekly/daily to make the platform efficient and reliable for the developers.

Comments

  1. Rene Dudfield

    Rene Dudfield on 02/04/2008 1:24 a.m. #


    How does it relate to pygame at all?<br />
    <br />
    I can't find a project home for OLPCGames, is there one?<br />
    <br />
    Is OLPCGames implementing pygame APIs on OLPC?<br />
    <br />
    Or does it implement new APIs?

  2. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 02/04/2008 10:32 a.m. #


    Homepage is: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPCGames<br />
    <br />
    OLPCGames is just a wrapper that lets Pygame games run under Sugar with access to the presence service and similar functionality on the platform. It's a GTK GUI that includes the standard "activity toolbar". It also provides access to the (GObject-based) DBUS services of the laptop.

  3. Rene Dudfield

    Rene Dudfield on 02/04/2008 5:36 p.m. #


    hello,<br />
    <br />
    the pygame project would like to help with this. Well at least I would :) I've tried to get involved with OLPC before, but haven't been able to find the right people to talk to.<br />
    <br />
    I think we'd treat it much like most other platforms that pygame supports - which I think makes the most sense. However obviously taking advantage of OLPCs differences.<br />
    <br />
    As I don't have one of the machines, is there an emulator or something I can use? Or a compiler setup with test farms or something? I guess I'd like to know how to get it running on a debian system? Are there any 'beginner developer manuals'?<br />
    <br />
    First I'm going to concentrate on getting pygame 1.8 released... which I think should be done within 4 weeks or so. But in that time I should be able to do some reading, and set up a test development environment for OLPC etc.<br />
    <br />
    cu,

  4. Rene Dudfield

    Rene Dudfield on 02/04/2008 10:19 p.m. #


    I would also like to note that I think games programming is probably the most common reason children start programming at all.<br />
    <br />
    So I think the OLPC project should reconsider funding for you on the games part - since the OLPC project is supposed to be about children learning?<br />
    <br />
    cu.

  5. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 02/05/2008 2:58 p.m. #


    There are emulators, packages and a sugar-jhbuild from-source installation process. Normally developers use a sugar-jhbuild environment on a Linux workstation to develop for the platform, but emulated images are available as well.<br />
    <br />
    OLPCGames is just a wrapper around Pygame, though it replaces a couple of modules in order to accomplish the embed-in-GTK behavior. It would be very cool if we could eliminate the embedding without losing the GObject-based functionality.<br />
    <br />
    If we could get both Pygame and GObject's event loops using the same select() operation that would be doable, but that would likely require quite a bit of GTK hacking AFAICS.<br />
    <br />
    As for the project paying for my work on OLPCGames, that was discussed and it was strongly suggested that I instead find a developer to work on the actual coding and that I concentrate on the Developer Relations stuff.

  6. Rene Dudfield

    Rene Dudfield on 02/05/2008 9:58 p.m. #


    hello,<br />
    <br />
    Did you know about the gtk SDL backend? Does OLPCGames use that? I'm pretty sure it's been developed specifically for OLPC. Not sure what the status is though...<br />
    http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/viewvc.cgi/branches/SDL-1.2-olpc/<br />
    <br />
    If that's not done already, I think that'd be the way to go.<br />
    <br />
    If you point me at a "how to start developing" guide for OLPC, that'd be cool. If there is such a document, I can't seem to find it. I guess I'd like to know where everyone discusses development too (mailing lists?)<br />
    <br />
    I found the sugar-jhbuild page here:<br />
    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_with_sugar-jhbuild<br />
    <br />
    cu,

  7. Rene Dudfield

    Rene Dudfield on 02/05/2008 11:38 p.m. #


    Found it. I think this is the developers manual:<br />
    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers

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