Re: Debian Games Team Policy
On Mon, 16 May 2011 at 17:21:18 +0100, Jon Dowland wrote:
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 02:42:09PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > I'm not sure what category the other Quake engines fall into - but to be honest
> > if we had the Quake 1 and 2 engines packaged, I'd be inclined to just put them
> > in contrib and give them a hard dependency on the non-distributable ID data,
> > since I haven't heard of any game content for either Quake 1 or 2 that's
> > as complete as the likes of OpenArena, Urban Terror or World of Padman.
>
> Agreed with the present state of F/OSS game data for those engines. But if
> OpenQuartz or similar did develop into something useful, how would we
> transition from hard dependency to virtual-package mediated? We'd need an
> engine upload (possibly with no other changes) to swap the dependency.
One option would be to do the same thing we did with OpenArena and Quake III,
but with the free vs. non-free order reversed:
- starting point: quake [contrib] (includes an engine) Depends: quake-data
- upload the engine (darkplaces or whatever) as a separate package
- change quake to have a Depends on darkplaces (or darkplaces|quake-engine)
and only contain "launcher" stuff for Quake 1
- upload openquartz, which (packaging-wise) looks a lot like quake
Uploading an engine isn't all that much trouble compared with
uploading something like openarena-data - they're relatively small.
Another option would be to pre-empt that by having the quake contrib package
never contain the engine at all, and packaging the engine separately from the
start. Still not a whole lot of point playing with virtual packages
until/unless we have two useful engines, though.
For "darkplaces" read "whichever Quake engine derivative is the best" -
darkplaces just happens to be the one I've heard of.
I don't think virtual packages or alternatives are right for the data, since
it can't be a drop-in replacement. (Functionally, maybe it is, but from
a user point of view, it isn't the same game - particularly where multiplayer
is concerned.)
S
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