A single drop,
causes the ocean to swell
So 5 weeks ago, SDL Perl was broken. It had been for several years. After the last release SDL Perl works ... somewhat. The quick releases that you have seen have been work-arounds, fixes and refactoring. This is not bad for a few weeks of work but, there is a point where code smell and technical debt is too huge to fix with out redesigning. This is that point.
Since the redesigning will take time and effort it will be good to have a leg up. This leg up is Frozen Bubble 2.20. Frozen Bubble employs a lot of C and Perl hacks to cover up for SDL Perl's lacking. This will help in a sense fast forward the code status to 2008. Since Frozen Bubble is helping us out, we can go one step forward and help it out!
So Alias (Adam Kennedy) and I have started work on making Frozen Bubble CPAN accessible. Frozen Bubble is a well know game and making it cross-platform will bring lots of attention and hopefully contributions to SDL Perl.
In Alias's
earlier post about this he mentioned about making a splash and some other stuff. I will talk about how and where we will be accomplishing this task.
First we will be tracking Frozen Bubble on the new
SDL Perl Trac website. This site will be similar to Padre's Trac site. As a bonus for people looking to help out in SDL Perl I have separated tasks by
perceived difficulty. This will help to breakdown harder task too.
For example for Frozen Bubble the two major bumps we have run into so far are:
Migrating the SDL Perl workarounds:
Ticket #3
The first one will be difficult as it involves XS. So I will break it down into easier tasks with specific instruction which can then hopefully be picked up by interested contributers. The second one there is sort of a forte of Adam so I will leave it up to him. This is the process I am proposing make hard tickets, break them down.
This will generate a lot of easy tickets that will hopefully be synchronized. If you are interested in this please give me a shout on #sdl irc.perl.org or the mailing list at sdl-devel@perl.org and I will get you registered.
--yapgh