Re: Newer vegastrike : can we package that big ?

[Andres Mejia <mcitadel@gmail.com>]

On Saturday 12 April 2008 7:25:09 pm Vincent Fourmond wrote:
>   Hello !
>
>   [replying to this particular mail, but in effect to the whole thread]
>
> Ivan Vucica wrote:
> > Perhaps someone should bug upstream to consider producing a smaller
> > version of the dataset. I'm sure they could strip some quality off of
> > textures, and kick some content out to produce VegaStrike-lite. Or
> > you, Vincent, could do that :)
> >
> > We could have:
> > vegastrike-data
> > vegastrike-data-lite (provides: vegastrike-data)
> > vegastrike-data-full (provides: vegastrike-data)
> >
> > vegastrike-data-full would be separately hosted (as suggested above),
> > perhaps by upstream following the
> > if-they-can-host-1gb-they-can-host-2gb-too logic" ^^
>
>   That's a good idea, except for the part 'Or you, Vincent, could do
> that' ;-)...

For games, I think it's a bad idea to sacrifice quality and performance over 
storage constraints. With this idea, it seems to me that it's only repeating 
the suggestion that the data packages be stored somewhere else. I'm not sure 
there will be that many users that will go for the lite version of a game 
instead of the full game for it to matter if there's a lite version of the 
game at all. It's sort of like carrying milk and watered down milk at your 
store and hope that people buy the watered down milk for you to even bother 
leaving it in your inventory.

> Anres Mejia wrote:
> > The idea I'm referring to is that the orig source could contain only a
> > "dummy" file and the upstream source is actually downloaded from
> > somewhere into debian/tmp, unpacked, and built from using plain old
> > debian/rules.
>
>   This is calling for a nightmare of FTBSes : if I remember correctly,
> the grid that rebuilds every once in a while the archive is not
> connected to the network - that will be a RC bug everytime. And people
> should be able to rebuild a package from the source on a CD (without a
> network connection).

Well, with this said, how do packages in contrib and non-free get built? Just 
curious.

>   I must admit that I currently don't have the courage to spawn a
> discussion about sourceless packages, even if that could be a way to
> alleviate the load of the mirrors.
>
>   I think I will finish the binary package in a first step, as it works
> reasonably fine with old data, and upload it as is. Then, I'll probably
> strip the music, which will lead to a source tarball of 330MB (which
> will also be the Arch: all package generated from it). That is big, but
> reasonable. This does not solve the installed-size problem, but that
> probably can wait.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but personally, I do not see a problem with 
the installed size at all. It would be nice if the installed size was smaller 
than 1GB, but when it comes to games, quality comes first well before storage 
constraints does.

-- 
Regards,
Andres