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Re: Debian Games Blend



Markus,

On 17/05/13 04:44 PM, Markus Koschany wrote:
> The name games.git is perfectly fine. I've moved debian-games.git to
> games.git right now. Maybe i thought the name of the new git repository
> should resemble the name of the old svn repo but i think i'm quite
> flexible here. If you need to make other changes, please go ahead.

Right now the live-games-image.git configuration grew up entirely
independently of the blend development and therefore doesn't use any of
the metapackages that debian-games.git builds. That is because it was
intended as a nice "LAN party" image with a selection of games that
would be fun to use, including non-free games and drivers to reach the
broadest possible audience. That's a bit of a different goal from a
blend. I did the work yesterday to ensure the live image is buildable
but as I indicated on #debian-games on irc, it still needs further work.

I would like to continue to assist where producing a live image is
concerned and would like to hear your ideas on what, if any, of the
live-games-image.git could be used by your blend. And even if you use
none of it, I'd still like to modify this image to incorporate blend
metapackages where possible, as that will cut down on duplication of effort.

Here are some thoughts on that, in no particular order:

Obviously some work went into making the selection of games to include
so that it would fit on 4G media, but it is long and unorganized. By
examining all included packages, it may help focus where work is needed
to enrich the debtags and also to build up the metapackages. Take a look
at config/package-lists/live-games.list.chroot, which is where all the
games are listed.

Some non-game-specific features of the image may be worth preserving.
For example, config/includes.chroot/etc contains some custom
configuration to go into /etc in the live system. Mind you, as much of
that as possible should be done via preseeding, and some of it may now
be antique and therefore needs to be reviewed and removed if no longer
needed.

The git commit history might tell us something about the rationale for
many of these customizations, except the half of it that existed before
I took it over and cleaned it up are in German. What we can't tell about
why a change is there from looking at the logs we might be better off
directly asking Bruno about (if he even remembers).

At some point, the free vs. non-free material needs to be sorted out so
that official and unofficial images may be built, if desired. Otherwise,
the only image buildable from this configuration currently fails the
definition of a Debian Pure Blend.

It may be that there is a sufficient disconnect between what has been
done in this project vs. what you want in the blend you are building
that the best approach for a live image is to start fresh. Given a list
of metapackages you want to include in the image, creating a bare-bones
live image (all packages installed with default configurations) based on
a gnome desktop might be as easy as:

$ mkdir live-games-blend
$ cd live-games-blend
$ git init
$ cp -r /usr/share/doc/live-build/examples/auto .
$ lb config
$ echo "task-gnome-desktop" > config/desktop.list.chroot
$ echo "games-card games-sim" >> config/games.list.chroot
$ # ^^ list here any other game metapackages you want
$ lb clean
$ git commit -a -m "Initial bare-bones live configuration."

And to build:

$ sudo lb build

Then additional customizations of the lb config options themselves
should be added to config/auto. This takes the place of 'config' target
in the Makefile and conforms with the recommendations of live-manual
about maintaining a clean configuration in git. You could then retain
the Makefile for convenience if you like, except with the bits now
handled by auto/* removed.

I don't even know where "make a live image for the blend" sits on your
list of priorities right now. However, as with the live-games-image.git
project, I continue to be interested in assisting the games team as a
"live images specialist" to assist in any way that I can to accomplish
whatever goals you might have in this department. That interest is not
so much in making the actual selection of games to go into it or even
doing the debtagging work, but more helping translate your
specifications for live images into a working, maintainable
configuration that could be used to build one or more images for
whatever purposes you imagine.

Regards,
Ben


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