Re: Debian Games Pure Blend
Hi Markus,
thanks a lot for this attempt which I consider a nice step forward to
make games in Debian even more easy to install for users and -- what's
IMHO even more important -- visible inside Debian. I just imagine bold
lines of news tickers like "Debian now supports games" when Debian Games
is mentioned in the Jessie release notes. :-) While we all know that
Debian had games quite from the beginning it could help to get Debian
out of the "servers only corner".
When speaking about this I would like to restart the "noise about
initial tasksel" we did years ago in #186085 which was closed without
beeing fixed. I could imagine an initial Blends menu in the installer
where you can select your favourite Blend(s) metapackages.
What do you think?
On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 01:09:50PM +0200, Markus Koschany wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have updated the Debian Games Pure Blend [1] [2] and I think that all
> task files are polished enough for an upload to NEW now. The main goal
> of this project is to make it easy for users to install a selection of
> specific games, like chess or simulation games. The tasks are still
> based on DebTags categories but they have been checked by hand for
> consistency and usability. The new blend installs only games from main.
Technical hint: You cen (and should) also mention packages from
non-free safely. The metapackage creation procedure of blends-dev is
checking packages in main/testing and degrades everything not listed
there (packages only in unstable, or in non-free or just in preparation
in VCS) to Suggests which in any case results in valid metapackages (at
the given point in time). So I explicitly encourage to add also
packages not (yet) in main to the tasks.
> I have also added two new tasks for installing console games and
> emulators and a third one that promotes "Debian's finest games".
I like this.
> Games which show up there were chosen due to popularity (popcon value),
> unique gameplay, look and feel, aesthetics, fun factor and a good
> portion of subjectivity. I don't claim that the list is set in stone.
... which is true for any task in Blends. :-)
> You can bribe me if your game should be included in there. The goal was
> to present outstanding games from different genres. Another idea for the
> future might be to create a "finest-light" task that installs only
> smaller and less hardware demanding games or more developer oriented
> tasks but that's just an idea.
>
> I have removed KDE and Gnome 3 specific games modules because it is
> possible to install them via separate metapackages. I also wanted to
> avoid that core components of these desktop environments are installed
> and mixed together.
What about tasks games-kde, games-gnome or do these metapackages exist
basically as kde-games, gnome-games resp. I do not use these so my
suggestion might be naive.
> At the moment I'm thinking about the next steps. I feel I'm more
> interested in learning how to create a Debian Live DVD/usb stick for
> games, so I think this could be the next goal.
I'd suggest the next step should be uploading the metapackages to new.
Once they arrived in the Debian pool you can use live-build and just add
the metapackages to the dependency list which should be basically whyt
cou need to do. If you do so I'd (strongly) recommend you commit all
the live-build into the repository[2]. Disclaimer: I never built any
live media but I have heard live-build would be the way to go - please
correct me if I'm wrong. Having an example in a repository would be
really helpful for other Blends.
> If you are interested in this project please let me know about your
> ideas and suggestions.
Thanks a lot for your effort
Andreas.
> [1] http://blends.debian.org/games/tasks/
> [2] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/blends/projects/games.git
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