Re: Fwd: Extremadura 2008 Debian Work Meetings
2008/2/12, Eddy Petrișor <eddy.petrisor@gmail.com>:
> I would be interested, but the timing is quite bad for me. DebConf and
> my wedding (early in September).
Congratz!!!
We might be able to find out a date that would be good for you?
> I always saw this as a problem for us, as a team. I agree, the DebConf
> 7 meeting was productive, but I find it hard to find other points
> than:
> - motivate without burnout - I am experiencing this now, unfortunately
> - "git as an alternative to svn" or "git as a svn client"
Why don't we take it back to the ideas we had in the foundation of the
Team? [1] If we have already fulfilled the most basic steps, we shall
move forwards to the next ones.
# Maintaining games collaboratively, as they tend to share many points
in common.
Ok, this one seems to be working OK, I don't think we would need much
discussion about it.
# "Scale economy" benefits: maintaining more packages, quicker and
with less effort.
Ditto.
# Open a way towards a larger involvement in Debian project to people
maintaining just one or few games.
I'm not sure if we have done anything towards this. In any case, we
have been already talking about some kind of mentoring for newbies
that enter the group. If we want to carry on with that, we might want
to define it.
# Quick-fixing of security issues common to games.
This is yet an unexplored area for us. We might want to have initial
discussions on how to move on towards this.
# Discussion of problems and facts relative to game packaging.
We already have some problems without a solution, AFAIK, like managing
big data packages, giving the user the possibility of having those
data in external read-only devices such as CD ROM and DVDs, etc.
We might also want to talk about handling non-free game data with free
engines, so that users can play some games they already bought in
Linux. This might include Doom, Quake, Descent, etc.
Also, I'm not sure if we have done something about being able to
handle different Quake scenarios and different datasets all at once.
We might want to talk about it, and also, if the solution is valid,
document and store it for other similar situations.
# Discussion of how the DFSG might be interpreted regarding multimedia
contents and artwork in games.
We haven't done anything about this. I still don't know what license
to recommend upstreams when they ask. Any interest in talking about
licenses applied to videogames?
# Identify important games that are not packaged yet and package them.
I think we might be doing a good job in this sense. I still have a
long list of unpackaged stuff, even more after joining the Fedora,
OLPC and Gentoo Games Teams, but it's more the time needed to properly
package them than identifying them. In any case, it might be
interesting to have an easy way for users to suggest new games. Maybe
in a dialog box inside GoPlay?
# Identify games that we were only maintaining out of inertia, and
consider dropping them.
I don't know much about this, but if anyone is taking care of this, we
might want to define a howto so that other people can step in and
help.
# Make it easier for users to know the games available in Debian,
maybe with some game selector interface, a web page, screenshots or
whatever.
So, what about thaw web page we talked about? Or defining a proper
screenshot managing framework? Please notice that my thumbnails
package is just a quick hack to solve that problem, we need something
more scalable. We already talked about it in DebConf, but haven't done
anything about it yet. We might want to share ideas about it.
# Collaborative maintenance of common infrastructure libs, like SDL.
Anything about this?
# Collaborative initial packaging of huge new games, like GPLed Nexuiz
first-person shooter.
Idem
# Handling licensing problems relative to games. Maybe even replacing
non-free bits with DFSG-free content.
Idem
Something else: Some weeks ago we talked about establishing some
relationship with other Linux distributions regarding games. We're
already working together Debian and Ubuntu people, and we have somehow
established some relationship with Fedora. Where do we want to get
along these lines, and how could we handle it?
That's all for the moment, but it's not all the ideas that I have, so
I'll probably write more about it.
Greetings,
Miry
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Games/Development
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