Re: RFS: zdoom
On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 09:14:49AM +0100, Jon Dowland wrote:
> URgh. I wrote game-data-packager to specifically avoid seeing such evil ever
> again. I'll let someone else look at this one :-)
I feel the need to clarify my position, to make sure I haven't led anyone up
the garden path or what-have-you.
I'm a member of the games team and for the last 5 years or so have been the
principal packager of Doom-related things. This is (happily) changing a bit,
with deng being maintained by someone else (albeit sponsored by me); vavoom
possibly coming along, and this ITP from zdoom.
It's my goal to take more of a back-seat on doom packaging going forward. I
am happy to offer advice on packaging and sponsor uploads for people who are
interested in maintaining doom-related packages themselves[1].
Zdoom is an important engine in the doom community: once upon a time it was
without a doubt the most popular engine available, in particular on the Windows
platform. I think it would be worthwhile packaging it.
Zdoom is, from Debian's perspective, unfortunately non-free, and the fmod
dependency likewise. Thus it cannot go into Debian proper, but can live in
the "non-free" archive. This is a distinction that some people feel strongly
about and others less so. My enthusiasm for working on things in Debian
diminishes if they are not in main.
Having said that, I would be prepared to sponsor uploads of zdoom into non-free
on behalf of someone who was interested in maintaining the package.
Separately, I once had a dislike of packages (like flashplugin-nonfree) which
don't actually contain the program they purport to package, but download bits
of it from the net in postinst. I wrote doom-package to try and encapsulate my
opinion on the best way to handle this (largely based on the way 'java-package'
worked at the time); doom-package became game-package and later
game-data-packager.
If you prepared a source package which was zdoom + fmod, I'd take a look at it.
However, my diminished enthusiasm for non-free packages[2], combined with my
aversion for postinst-abusing empty packages means I am not interested in
looking at zdoom-installer, which I think is the wrong approach to this
problem. (not least it means promoting build-depends into depends, so all
users of the package must install the toolchain to build zdoom, even after it's
built). Of course, other people may feel differently.
[1] time permitting I am of course willing to sponsor non-doom related
games uploads: I just haven't had time recently ☹
[2] you've put zdoom-installer in main but I'd argue it should be in
contrib. Incidentlaly flashplugin-nonfree is in contrib.
--
Jon Dowland
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