Re: RFS: snes9x
On Mon, 2011-10-03 at 00:21 +0200, Etienne Millon wrote:
> Hello, I am the second co-maintainer of zsnes :)
> Let me add the following to what Eshat said :
>
> > ZSNES is fine, fast and highly stable. I happily used it for years. It'd
> > be perfectly acceptable, except for the fact that it uses i386 assembly
> > and therefore isn't portable. Though I've heard rumors of people being
> > able to cross-compile ZSNES with 32-bit libraries, I never had any
> > success, which is how I came about using snes9x a couple years ago.
>
> zsnes is now available for amd64 too, but you are right that a
> non-intel port is impossible.
>
It is? I can't figure out how to build it for the amd64, and Debian
doesn't build an amd64 package for zsnes. Does it involve building a
32-bit binary?
> > Although I am a native English speaker, so I have no experience, ZSNES
> > has no translations that I can see, whereas the GTK version of snes9x
> > has five translations.
>
> Good call. I haven't checked how difficult it could be, but i18n can
> be a goal for a future release.
>
> > I feel that the GTK interface is nicer than the DOS-esque one of ZSNES,
> > but I'll admit that's a personal preference.
>
> zsnes has an old fashioned GUI which is part of its charm (like
> scummvm's), but may look "rough" for users. A GTK frontend is
> definitely a good idea, I don't know if any of these are maintained :
>
> http://www.zophar.net/frontends/snes.html
>
> But let's go back to snes9x :)
>
> What concerns me more is the fact that it comes with a non-free
> license. However, this is the main alternative for non-intel users
> (bsnes has a different audience, I believe, as it focus more on
> precision than performance), and it provides netplay support
> (impossible in zsnes ATM), so I am in favour of its inclusion.
>
I left the debian/copyright from the old packaging before the RoQA, I
just want to make sure that the license that was included is still
correct since the source doesn't provide any license information and
their forum is hard to navigate. Is the non-commercial use clause what
makes it non-free according to the DFSG?
> I can't sponsor your package as I am not a DD, but I had a look at it.
>
> - As the debexpo page shows, it has several lintian warnings :
>
> http://mentors.debian.net/package/snes9x
>
> I: snes9x source: quilt-patch-missing-description fix-typo.patch
> W: snes9x source: out-of-date-standards-version 3.8.4 (current is 3.9.2)
> I: snes9x-x: possible-documentation-but-no-doc-base-registration
> W: snes9x-gtk: binary-without-manpage usr/games/snes9x-gtk
>
You managed to get more warnings out of lintian than I did! I uploaded
what I had scraped together but I'm still working on writing a manpage
for snes9x-gtk.
> - the package builds cleanly in a sid chroot, but dpkg-shlibdeps
> complains about useless shared libraries. The usual fix is to use
> --as-needed at the linker phase, but it is not mandatory (if you
> plan to port your package to Ubuntu, I think it is the case).
>
I use Ubuntu as my system, I don't think it was an issue before in the
old package but I'll find out.
> - debian/control : I belive that snes9x-gtk should depend on
> snes9x-x as it is unusable without it.
>
> - debian/changelog : you should close the wnpp bug under the "New
> maintainer" entry.
>
> - debian/rules : the override_dh_install target may be replaced with
> an entry in snes9x-x.install
>
> Have a nice day !
> --
> Etienne Millon
>
Thanks a lot for the packaging advice! I'll try to tidy it up a bit.
Cheers,
Michael
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