Fellow Games Team members,
I am planning to convert the WorldForge packages in Debian to instead pull the upstream snaps, as the Chromium team has done in Ubuntu [1]. Since this is a major change, I'd like to explain why I'm planning to make this change and see if any of you have recommendations that I have not yet considered.
There are two realities that drove me to making this change:
1) The current stable WorldForge packages have not been updated upstream in many years. They are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and the recent Python 2 removal has essentially made the game server (cyphesis-cpp) unmaintainable. I don't have the time to manually update hundreds of files to support Python 3, and cherry-picking from upstream would be almost as difficult due to unrelated major changes they have made.
2) I considered packaging the newer upstream packages but they are not stable enough to do so. I recently confirmed this with the upstream lead developer.
So, since I can't keep the current versions and I can't package the newer versions, that limits what we can do with those packages! Fortunately, upstream builds snaps as part of their CI/CD process. The lead developer suggested that although the code base is rapidly changing, the packages change in parallel so the newest snaps should always work correctly together. Since the supporting libraries are only used in the WorldForge client (ember) and the server (cyphesis-cpp) I would likely remove them from Debian once the two applications were migrated to snaps.
Looking forward to any additional insights any of you may have!
-Olek