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[school-discuss] Tuxmath and programs no longer actively developed



I contacted the Tuxmath developers list to see if there were any plans to update Tuxmath for SDL2 and find out what the development roadmap looked like. The only response I got back was from another independent developer who's working on porting TuxPaint to SDL2.

I've heard from some educators that they findÂTuxPaint, Tuxmath, TuxTyping useful. Would be a shame to see programs like these no longer end up in distributions because of "bit rot". FreeBSD has some nice educational entertainment programs (Hangman, Scramble and Concentration) that I don't see available in as many Linux distributions any more because they're no longer actively developed. I think it would be great if Schoolforge could do something about the situation and help continue to make useful older programs available even if the original developers are no longer supporting them.

A lot of SDL 1.2.x applications will probably need to be ported to SDL 2.x at some point especially if a Linux system is going to be using Wayland in the future instead of X. (There's a port of SDL 2.x to Wayland, but I haven't seen one for SDL 1.2.x.)ÂÂSome older applications that use libpng need to be updated for API changes to the library. These are just a few of the changes that could affect whether programs continue to work and build on various systems.

By the way, Syllable has a nice list of applications: https://sites.google.com/site/syllablesoftware/home Not all of them are SDL based, but many of them are.Â

Is there anything Schoolforge could do as a group to identify useful educational programs that may no longer be actively developed and consolidate efforts to keep some of these programs working and available to Open Source users?

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/cpp