Re: Distro-agnostic advice for Godot Engine packaging (related to ITP #793057)
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 5:23 PM, Rémi Verschelde wrote:
> TL;DR: If there's interest I can work with you to get Godot packaged
> in your distro, as I'm a Mageia (RPM) packager myself and Godot dev.
Thanks for the mail, I would suggest sending Bruno (the ITPer) and the
ITP a link to the archive of your post.
> I maintain a good deal of games and related libraries for Mageia [2],
> and am also an upstream contributor to Godot Engine [3].
As upstream you may want to read through a couple of guides:
https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Games/Upstream/
> There are no "make install" instructions
That seems like something that should be fixed.
> ... scons ...
I'd encourage Godot upstream to consider switching to cmake or autotools.
> (provided they were designed for the same Godot version)
It sounds like Godot breaks compatibility with old games a bit?
> Then there are the SVG icon and desktop file, that's pretty
> straightforward (I'm not using the upstream SVG icon as I don't like
> it's "Android app-like" background :), so I made my own without the
> background).
Have you considered getting this merged upstream?
> Some binaries (the templates and `godot-runner') are compressed with
> upx, which is pretty efficient and what upstream does for their
> official binaries. I'd be interested to hear about experienced
> packagers whether this would be a bad practice as far as Linux
> packaging is concerned though.
I thought this was against Debian Policy but I seem to be
mis-remembering. In any case it isn't something that is usually done.
> You will probably also find some libraries that you will want to see
> unbundled.
That is the Debian policy.
https://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedCodeCopies
> for Godot however one has to remember that the binaries produced
> (at least for the templates) need to run on virtually any Linux distribution
I'm not sure this is a good idea or even possible, since ABIs change
over time and security issues get fixed. You may as well package up a
chroot into the binaries somehow, at least then you could do security
updates on that. Either way I'm not sure we would accommodate this on
Debian. If it is mandatory I'd suggest not packaging Godot, users can
download from the website.
> Sorry for the lengthy email, but I hope it contains useful information
> if you have packagers interested in Godot. The packaging method I
> described above is also not necessarily the best way to package Godot,
> and I'd welcome any feedback about it too.
Definitely useful, thanks.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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