Re: Introduction
2007/12/24, Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede@hhs.nl>:
> Hi all,
Hi Hans!
> 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.
I totally agree with you, and I'm very interested in establishing a
collaborative relationship among our Teams, so I really thank you a
lot for this offer. This kind of cooperation among game development
teams among different free software distributions have always been in
my mind, and you're right, there's no sense in reinventing the wheel
:)
> 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.
Thanks a lot for these tips, they're certainly very valuable!
> 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
I'll subscribe myself to that list, thanks for the invitation :)
It might make sense to create some distribution-agnostic mailing list,
or a way to share whatever could be useful for all different
distributions, especially regarding to sharing knowledge, information
about freeness of games, patches and so, or maybe just information
about what each of us is doing, who is taking care of what, and where
to get patches and so. I've done some game development stuff together
with people from gentoo, so I wonder if there would be more game
development teams from other distros willing to join a common project
like this. What do you all think about something like this?
> Thanks & Regards,
>
> Hans
Greetings, and happy Christmas (or winter solstice, whatever you
prefer) to everyone :)
Miry
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