Re: quality assurance for games
Hi Markus,
I think it's a great idea to look after all orphaned games in Debian and
eventually request their removal if nobody wants to incorporate them
into the team.
There is a huge amount of mini-games in Debian and a lot of redundancy.
As long as no bugs are piling up, that's not really a problem, but it
means that the decision to let go certain games can be easier.
The date of the last upload or when upstream died does not matter if the
game works well, because I don't think the value of a game depends on
the frequency of updates. Reasons to remove a game are
* The game is orphaned for some time and we decide it's not worth
keeping it. - If a game that looks neglected is not team maintained and
not orphaned, we should apply the MIA and orphaning procedures.
* If a game is maintained by us and we decide it's not worth keeping it.
Before considering the removal of packages maintained by the Games Team,
we should always try to get the opinion of the Games Team members who
worked on it.
I think all the games you mentioned can be considered for removal. BTW,
XBoing works here. I would add xbill (same as stepbill.app, yes
"outdated" is spot on for a game about killing Bill Gates :)) to the list.
Another problem are mini-games that are added to the upload queue. Right
now we say "package it and we will probably review and upload". But
nobody wants to review yet another mini-game like watermelons or no-dice
which are currently wasting away on the queue. The people who packaged
them will maybe never package anything again. Maybe we should tell them
to first ask the list if there's a potential sponsor, at least for
mini-games.
Best regards,
Tobias
Am 27.10.2012 18:05, schrieb Markus Koschany:
> Hi everyone,
>
> during the past months i have started to adopt orphaned packages which i
> personally found worthwhile to work on and to keep in Debian. I also
> discovered some packages which were abandoned by the Games Team back in
> 2009, e.g [1]. Obviously the intention had been to remove these games
> completely from Debian after three months, but that has never happened. This
> made me wonder whether it would be a good idea to create some kind of
> site map, perhaps a wiki page, which keeps track of all those orphaned
> games. Going even further i think we should not only keep track of games
> which were maintained by the Games Team but of all games which are
> currently unmaintained and revise the list at least once in a year.
>
> In fact not many orphaned packages are games thus i think the effort is small.
>
> My reasons for this proposal are:
>
> * If the Games Team doesn't care about games, it's unlikely that others in Debian will.
> Hence these games will rot in the archive.
>
> * Nobody else can better assess whether a game is interesting enough and worthy
> to stay in Debian than the Team which focusses on games.
>
> * QA-work is not the sole responsibility of the QA-Team. If we decide
> to orphan games and nobody has taken care of them within a certain
> amount of time (i think one release cycle = 2 years is more than
> enough), then they should be removed from Debian immediately.
>
> I think the following games fail because they were all orphaned a long time ago,
> are outdated, visually unpleasing and even worse, boring.
>
> If we can find a consensus about these games on the list, i suggest to
> delegate the issue to the QA-Team who in turn could file a request for
> removal. Or we could do the same ourselves.
>
> XBattle
> =======
> Last upload was in 2008. Upstream is dead since 1996. The game looks
> very outdated and makes it unnecessarily difficult to play it.
>
> XBoing
> ======
>
> Last upload 2008. Upstream is dead since 1996. Actually unusable and
> won't even start because of some font/sound bugs.
>
> shisen.app
> ==========
> Last upload 2008. There are a lot of shisen/mahjongg alternatives
> available. The gnustep migration will cause additional work.
>
> stepbill.app
> ============
> Outdated. Last upload 2008. Boring gameplay and design. The yeah button
> didn't work.. Gnustep migration will cause additional work.
>
> battleball
> ==========
> Old and ugly. Unintuitive gameplay. Last upload 2008.
>
> Xchain
> ======
> The package seems to be in a good shape, last QA upload was in 2011. The
> game itself looks outdated but is not as bad as the aforementioned ones.
> I would remove it from unstable, but keep it in Wheezy.
>
> Xbomb
> =====
> Another minesweeper clone. Looks very outdated. The package is in a good
> shape. Last QA upload was in 2012. I would remove it from unstable and
> keep it in Wheezy.
>
> XTux
> ====
>
> Should Xtux be a dropper? [2] Yes, i think so. Ok it's some kind of
> linux classic but honestly we should finally let it go.
>
>
> What's your opinion?
>
> Regards,
>
> Markus
>
>
>
> [1] http://bugs.debian.org/544926
> [2] http://bugs.debian.org/538269
>
Reply to: