Re: Distro-agnostic advice for Godot Engine packaging (related to ITP #793057)
2016-02-24 12:06 GMT+01:00 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>:
> 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.
Thanks, I will do that.
>
>> 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/
I'll have a look.
>
>> There are no "make install" instructions
>
> That seems like something that should be fixed.
That could likely be implemented yes.
>
>> ... scons ...
>
> I'd encourage Godot upstream to consider switching to cmake or autotools.
That won't happen, as upstream has good reasons for using Scons in the
first place: http://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/reference/introduction_to_the_buildsystem.html#scons
>
>> (provided they were designed for the same Godot version)
>
> It sounds like Godot breaks compatibility with old games a bit?
Godot 2.0 does, hence the major version bump. There are not so many
Godot games available so far so it has not been a major concern up to
now, but ensure compatibility with older games is something we always
try to keep in mind (and it's all the more relevant for Linux
distributions, as they won't want to package several concurrent Godot
versions if some games happen not to work anymore with e.g. Godot
3.0).
>> 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?
Yes, I've actually just fixed it:
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/commit/eb5f9ed89be7be2ba147cb95ee74516ce4862d01
>> 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.
I don't think the lead developers will want to change the system,
making fat binaries seems to be the only viable solution to have
binaries that can run on any platform and especially any Linux distro.
Of course it's not pretty from a packager's point of view :)
Debian could package Godot (the editor) without the templates, plus
the runner I suggested (that would stay Debian-specific like any other
binary), and let users download the official export templates from the
website indeed.
Thanks for the feedback!
Regards,
Rémi
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