Re: RFS: 0ad

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Philip Taylor <excors@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org> wrote:
> For Ubuntu users, upstream could include the newer enet in their PPA.
> The packages containing the library itself are co-installable, only the
> -dev packages for enet 1.2 and 1.3 are not.

Hmm, I'm not particularly familiar with how the PPAs work, but if
adding enet there requires zero extra effort from users installing the
game then I think that'd be okay.

Uploading to a Launchpad PPA works practically the same way as uploading a package to Debian would, and it's a lot faster too (nobody needs to review your packaging, for one thing). Once it's up and running, users would simply have to add the PPA to their sources.list, and proceed to install 0 A.D. like any other package.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:name-of-ppa

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install 0ad

Granted, the whole process would be one step shorter if 0ad and all its dependencies are put in Ubuntu's own repositories (so users wouldn't have to add the PPA), but otherwise isn't any more complicated for the user. All that has to be done is to ensure that 0 A.D. and the dependencies that aren't already in Ubuntu's repositories are all uploaded to the PPA, and that these packages take preference over the same packages in Ubuntu's repositories.

> I don't know how to best handle other distributions, but doesn't
> upstream have to bundle enet anyway for Windows and Mac OS X users?

On Windows we bundle precompiled binaries (.dll and .lib), so that can
be upgraded easily and is independent of the Linux / OS X approach.

On OS X we don't bundle - we typically use MacPorts which currently
provides ENet 1.2 (http://libenet.darwinports.com/) but I think we
could give them an upgraded portfile and it'd be immediately available
to all users.

For all Fedora/Mandriva/OpenSUSE versions I think we could upgrade the
library at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=libenet&project=games
so it'd work for users who install the game from that service. Arch
and Gentoo already have packages for 1.3 and don't have users on old
distro versions. I think all other distros that have packages for the
game are too minor to worry over - they can sort themselves out as
necessary.

So, I suppose this could work - just need to set up ENet 1.3 packages
for MacPorts and the OpenSUSE Build Service and the Ubuntu PPA, and
recompile on Windows, and update the game code. (Not an entirely
trivial amount of work, unfortunately :-( )