Recommencement of Allegro packaging (in the Debian Games Team)

[Tobias Hansen <tobias.han@gmx.de>]

After my ITP for Allegro 5, Andreas Rönnquist has volunteered to join me
maintaining Allegro, and we decided to also take care of Allegro 4,
which is orphaned and needs to be updated from 4.2 to 4.4.

Since Allegro itself is orphaned, I guess the pkg-allegro-maintainers
team is pretty much dead. We learned from the SDL and the Allegro teams
that such small teams have a hard time surviving over the years, so we
think that it's better to continue maintaining Allegro in the Debian
Games team.

Sam Hocevar, Mark Purcell and Alexandre Pineau, you are the
pkg-allegro-maintainers. Do you agree with that? If you still want to
help out with Allegro, that would be of course highly appreciated. If we
all agree to get rid of the Allegro team, we should remove
pkg-allegro-maintainers from package maintainer fields and maybe close
the Alioth project at some point.

In Debian, these games are using allegro4.2:

  wing
  stax
  rafkill
  overgod
  open-invaders
  liquidwar
  kraptor
  kball
  garden-of-coloured-lights
  excellent-bifurcation
  ballz
  atanks
  alex4
  aseprite (not in Debian yet)

Of these, only atanks, liquidwar and aseprite seem to have some recent
activity and a chance to get ported to Allegro 5.
Allegro 4 and 5 are incompatible, so we need both in the archive.

Since future Allegro transitions could become a bit involved, I would
like to make sure that we choose the most convenient package names. I
would call the Allegro 5.0 source package allegro5 in the hope that we
won't need a new one for Allegro 5.2 etc. The library packages have to
be called liballegro5.0 after the soname. What about the dev packages?
liballegro5-dev or liballegro5.0-dev providing liballegro5-dev? For the
documentation I was thinking allegro5-doc.

Currently the allegro4.2 source package builds among others the packages
allegro-examples and allegro-demo. The sources are in the liballegro-doc
package. I don't think allegro-examples or allegro-demo are very
interesting or important, so I suggest discontinuing them. We will
continue to ship the sources of the examples in the doc packages. Should
we still continue to build the examples (without packaging the results)
to make sure that they build successfully?

The packaging is happening here:
http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-games/allegro5.git;a=summary
http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-games/allegro4.4.git;a=summary

Best regards,
Tobias