Created attachment 20729 [details] [review]
Proposed patch

sorry for the spam, setting the PATCH keyword (my first gnome patch
woohoo!)

Sorry for the delay.  I just got back into the country.

It is true that there is currently no direct way to reset the balance
from the game interface.  However, it can be modified using gconf
tools.  For example:
gconftool-2 --set /apps/blackjack/global/balance --type float 1000

The purpose of the new button is to start a new game (and "shoe"). 
The balance should not be reset during a new game.  The balance is
meant to represent your bankroll.  Therefore, it should follow you
around.  If you go into debt the only way out is to win more :) 
Another factor is that this value is shared between all instances of
the game.  For example, you can have any number of games going
(theoretically even on different machines) and you still have the same
balance/bankroll.

I'm not opposed to having a way to reset the balance but I didn't
include it because I couldn't figure out a clean way to do it.

Another problem with your patch is that it adds a confirmation dialog.
 We worked hard to remove all those nasty little beasts from
gnome-games for 2.4.

Maybe a better way is to add a button to the Game tab in Preferences
to "Reset Balance."?  But what should it reset it to?  Does a zero
balance to start a betting game make sense?

Thanks for the patch though.  If you are still interested, I would
probably accept a patch for the preferences dialog.

Any thoughts Callum?

My main thought is that this is up to the author of the game ;).

But of course I can't keep my mouth shut:

Hitting "reset balance" should reset things back to the way a
freshly-installed game would (not the preferences like ruleset, just
the state). That answers the question about what balance to use
doesn't it ?

I agree that resetting the balance should be in preferences rather
than a consequence of the "new" or "reset" menu options. However Damon
has a point in that it isn't immediately obvious what "New" and
"Reset" are meant to do in the context of the game. "New game" does
not start a new game (in the sense of resetting all of the games's
state) but it starts a new hand. You may want to change the wording to
"New Hand" and "Reset Hand".

I should also say that, to me, having these two options seems like
micro-managing the game to an absurb extent and maybe they shouldn't
be there at all. This is however up to you since I am not a dedicated
blackjack player and you have far more of an idea about what is wanted
that I do.

Discussion is good.

Quick clarification before I go off and think a bit:
New == New shoe with new seed (a shoe is a stack of decks)
Restart == Restart shoe with same seed

Restarting uses the same random seed so that all cards will come out
in the same order again.  This can be useful (maybe) to try to test
different strategies.

While I don't mind using gconftool, my wife was confused by a negative
 balance of -$1505 when she started playing blackjack on my computer
for the first time, and I'm sure that most players don't discover that
the balance is saved until at least the second time they play, if not
the third of fourth...  Perhaps a simple prefs checkbox for "*
Persistent Balance", default unchecked, would be better than a balance
reset button?

The new preferences dialog has a balance reset button.

This bug is being reassigned to the "general" component so we can close the blackjack bugzilla component.  Apologies for the mass email!