Introduction
Hi all,
I'm a long time Linux enthusiast and developer. Lately I'm mainly active
porting and / or improving open source games to / for Linux (and writing kernel
drivers for hardware monitoring chips). I'm also a Fedora contributer and most
of my Linux games related work is done in the form of creating and maintaining
Fedora packages. Where applicapable I send patches upstream, but
(unfortunately) for many games upstream is dead.
Within Fedora I'm one of the most active members of the Games Special Interest
Group:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Games
I currently maintain 200 packages in Fedora's main repository of which about
100 are games, see:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/users/packages/jwrdegoede
I (and other Fedora contributers) spend a lot of time and energy on Linux Game
development, and I would really like to coordinate this with you guys so that
we don't reinvent the wheel (on either side) I always try to look at Debian's
packages when I hit a problem and / or start a new package, and since Fedora
now has quite a few games which Debian doesn't I would like to invite you to do
the same, and to feel free to ask questions about any changes we've done.
For example I saw that No Gravity is on your wishlist, I just spend about 16
hours writing a patch for that to make it 64 bit clean (and I'm _really_
experienced by now in cleaning up 64 bit issues, this one was nasty), so if you
package it please use my patch and spend those 16 hours doing something else
beneficiary to opensource gaming which I then can borrow back :) For the No
gravity 64 bit patch see:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=366841
For another example where sharing knowledge is good, I saw you are working on
ufoai. Beware that the data is not DSFG free, upstream is working on cleaning
up things, but as is this is not suitable for the main repo of debian, see:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=425956
I also see maniadrive on your wishlist, I already have that packaged for
Fedora, its a bit of a !@#$@ to package, so please contact me if you start
working on it, then I can try to share what I have learned.
Last you might be interested in (or disgusted by) autodownloader,
autodownloader is a python glade application, which can be scripted through
simple ini-ish files to prompt a user that some non distributable content needs
to be downloaded for a game to function and ask for permission to connect to
the internet, then can show another prompt with a license (if instructed todo
so through the ini), and even more prompts. Once all the configured prompts are
ok-ed, it will download files from a list of files in the ini to a designated
location, each file can have multiple mirrors, and will be md5 sum checked.
Failing mirrors will be skipped automatically, slow mirrors can be skipped by
the user. And this all wrapped in a nice gtk2 interface with progress bars for
the downloads etc. I already saw a wget shell script left and right for things
like this in Debian, but if you do this you really want to use autodownloader
as that is very userfriendly. Its also handy for very big datafiles like those
of World of Padman and Urban Terror, then you don't have to carry those in the
repositories. The easiest way to see autodownloader in action is to install
Fedora, then do "yum install vavoom" and then click one of the doom / heretic
shareware / hexen demo launchers in the games menu.
Well thats all I think, I will be lurking on this list, trying to help where I
can and hopefully pick up some useful info in the process. Feel free to
subscribe to the (low volume) Fedora games list and lurk there:
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-games-list
Thanks & Regards,
Hans
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