[Aptitude-devel] Bug#515532: "minesweeper feature" vs. UNIX philosophy

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

2009-02-17 03:53 Daniel Burrows:
> [...]
>  Minesweeper is not a maintenance burden and it adds character to the
>program.  One of the few perks of writing code for free is that I can
>produce software which is recognizably written by a human being and not
>by an automaton.  I get to write the other type all day,
>thankyouverymuch.  If you want to finance my work on aptitude, then
>maybe we can discuss my development priorities.
>
>  The only thing that might convince me to remove Minesweeper is if the
>translation team said it was an undue burden on them: most of the
>changes over the years have been in its translations.  I doubt that's
>the case, though: there have been a grand total of 349 insertions into
>all the Minesweeper help files over four years, and none of those files
>have changed after being inserted.  It's not fair to give the numbers
>for po/, because the nature of those files is that they change even
>when no-one has worked on them, but the number of translations in just
>*one* pofile (most of which are not Minesweeper) is larger than the
>number of lines in all the help.txt files put together.

Starting from bug https://bugs.debian.org/790568 , I had originally
said:

  > .oO I sometimes wonder if it would not be better to just remove the
  >     minesweeper altogether.  It is sort of fun/amusing and it's not a
  >     big burden to keep it going, but as cases like these show, it's not
  >     zero-maintainance either.

To add a bit about this, in the last few years (even with development
stalled for long periods of time) there were the following maintainance
costs:

- To address the bug #790568

  For the translators, this meant to translate for years strings that
  were behind "#if 0", not even used (disabling the code didn't disable
  the strings to be gathered for translation).

  That is, Minesweeper had 9 short strings to translate that were really
  used, and 21 which are actually from what it seems to be copied from
  another game / project (or a previous version of the code).

- The recent fix of the L/S ( https://bugs.debian.org/736934 ) -- back
  and forth messages and patches, applying, testing, messages in
  changelogs

- I had to spend time in the last week to make changes to the
  documentation, including links to images in the section of the
  Minesweeper (which is one of the better documented parts of aptitude,
  and with many screenshots, I have to say).

  This part has also seen translations, and we have translations to
  about 8 languages now of the guide (I guess that all of them also
  translate the part of Minesweeper, with its screenshots).

- There have been changes in translations, automake files and code in
  2012-2014


All of them are often small changes, true, and as Daniel Burrows said
most of them are part of wider changes in the source (automake, etc).
But still, even if they are mechanical changes, that means extra
mechanican changes.

And that only 15 years later a translator discovers that the bulk of the
gettext-translatable messages of this code didn't need translating
because they are not used, after almost all of the current 40 .po files
translate those lines, for me is telling that this should be disabled.


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>