Re: RFS: 0ad

[Scott Howard <showard314@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 8:10 AM, David Paleino <dapal@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Apr 2011 21:59:59 -0700, Vincent Cheng wrote:
>
>> Dear mentors,
>>
>> I am looking for a sponsor for my package "0ad".
>>
>> * Package name    : 0ad
>> [..]
>haven't checked the package, but given I'd like to play it, I tried to build
> it, and it FTBFS because of libenet. It seems like it wants libenet0 (1.2.*),
> but in Debian we have libenet1a (1.3*).

I started looking at 0AD recently, just wanted to summarize some things I saw.

-libenet was just updated in debian less than a month ago. I don't
think upstream is planning on updating it soon, but someone form
either playdeb or Wildfire will have to do that since playdeb's
package and wildfire's compilation instructions for debian/ubuntu say
to grab libenet-dev to compile.

- As for inclusion in Debian: 0AD has some bundled library issues
(e.g. fcollada). The fcollada issue has been mentioned on this list
[1-2]. Basically fcollada was a library created by a company 10 years
ago with a GPL license. Since then the company stopped maintaining it
and removed it from their website. Many projects grabbed the latest
release and forked it for their own needs. There are at least 4 major
forks out there which are all hacked for individual projects (there
are many other patched versions, but it's hard to keep track). I tried
to merge all of the major changes together in a way that each project
can use, but each fcollada library is pretty much an independent
project now where significant work will be needed to get a single
library that everyone can use. Debian requires one canonical library,
and right now the only practical solution would be to have packages
for each of the major forks (which over the past 10 years have grown
incompatible with each other), but I don't think that is allowed.
Also, Wildfire/0AD needs an fcollada library which is compilable with
MSVC building DLLs for windows (which I am not interested in nor
capable of doing well.)

The last time 0AD was discussed on this list [1], objections were
raised about the inclusion of the fcollada library. If wildfire
produces the most recent and well-maintained fcollada library
available, does that one become the canonical fcollada library (and
should it be packaged as is from wildfire/0AD as the libfcollada in
debian?)

With the amount of work maintaining 0AD may need, you might want to
form a sub-team of debian-games to take care of it.

Cheers,
Scott

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2010/09/msg00005.html
[2] sorry can't find the l.d.o link:
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.devel.mentors/browse_thread/thread/198b3d604613b17a