[crossfire] Crossfire release?

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

>   Been a little more than 6 months since last official release, and I was
> thinking that trying to get one out before end of the year might be nice.
> 
>   Thoughts/comments?

1.50.0 is broken.  One cannot create a new character due to a .glade file
bug.  A release is needed.  Technically, a 1.50.1 could consist of a new
dialogs.glade file only.  The fix is in SVN already, but, I think I'd prefer to
see a general release since so much time has passed.

Yes, getting one out would be nice to hit a new round of distribution hits
to replace the broken client.  I don't really know of any serious stability
reports out there, though some users seem to be confused by the
account / character setup dialogs.
 
>   Any list of bugs or other things that must be fixed before a release is
> made?

One place where stuff is recorded is:

http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/known_client_issues

#2938902 crossfire-client-gtk2 has get/take errors
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2938902&group_id=13833&atid=113833

There are a few others in the tracker too... though I'm not sure how
significant they are.  I think a fair number of them are Windows
client issues, but this one is one I run into.

IMO, it is time to ditch gtk-v2.glade as the default.  It is becoming a
not so uncommon event for a new user to come on IRC and have fits
getting the important window panels to show up (inventory in particular).
I've had one disappear off IRC after trying hard to help with little success.
I'd personally rate this pretty much a necessity.  Maybe dealing with that
should be a different thread though.

I did work to fix the caching of hosts in the metaserver dialog, but there
is a bug still left. Somehow the cache list displayed isn't quite right.  I
haven't followed up to find out what's wrong yet.

I'd like to rework the new dialogs.  They do not match the style of the
other dialogs, and, IMO, with apologies to the designer, ugly.  It is not
necessary to do so, but already that client has a reputation for its not
so elegant looks.

FWIW, I'd also like to rework the main windows the same way I did the
dialogs.  I think that would help people find the resize bars more
easily.  Not critical, but might alleviate issues with gtk-v2.glade
somewhat.

>   Likewise, any list of the major changes since last release?  Looking at
> changelog can be a little problematic, as it may not be readily apparent
> from the notes whether it is a significant/meaningful change.

As for ChangeLog, I've personally taken to heart an IRC conversation about
that document.  I have started only logging things there that seem likely to
be of end-user interest., and to allow the SVN log to serve as the technical
change log.

An important fix for the client is that it should handle backslash vs slash
delimited paths properly now when built on windows.

Dynamic resize of spells dialog is added.  This is pretty significant.  A
great deal of effort went into populating all the spell help, and the text
reflow capability means the dialog is much more useful on a variety of
desktop environments.

The client has preliminary support for Spellmon 2 (spells that require
ingredients), but ingredient listing is not end-user visible at this time.

The client now has a 30 second timeout instead of a 3-4 minute lockup
if a connection attempt is made to a host/port that does not have a
listening server.  (Probably 30 seconds is still too long...)

Issues with [X] close of dialogs has been improved and segfaults under
some window managers are prevented.  Delete events are now trapped
and ignored to prevent dialogs from disappearing and requiring a client
restart to correct the situation.  I wonder if the most recently added
dialogs are in need of the same fix applied to the account system dialogs.

Music is working in GTK-V2 though there is no mechanism to deliver music
with the client.  I think some work needs to be done to at least define a
system-wide location for music and a user-specific location for music.
We also have no infrastructure set up to distribute media either.  Not
sure its worth making a big deal about the new feature at this point.

Sound effects are not done at this point, but the infrastructure is technically
operational as I can play sound effects in a tweaked development work
space, but the server-to-client link is not complete.  I think some factoring
 needs to be done to get a reasonable implementation.  All the points made
about music are pretty much also true for sound effects.

Sound/Music may eventually need with respect to possibly fixing old
.crossfire folder content, but then maybe one needs to just ditch the
legacy files rather than try convert them to the new system.  (The old
system was severely broken as it used hard-coded absolute paths that
could single-handedly disable sound if changes occurred upstream.)

Even with the incomplete implementation, cfsndserv and friend should be
release-safe.

>   I figure release should probably be called 1.51, but could do 1.60 - not
> sure if that makes much difference.

Probably don't want to go in such big hops as to get to 1.100+ is all I have 
to add to that.  On one hand the client changes are significant.  On the other,
without a corresponding server release, its probably a bit weird to go
jumping the client by leaps and bounds.