On Mon, Dec 31, 2001 at 01:12:25AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote: > Jeff, unless I'm mistaken you've taken over maintainence of the debian > packaging of quakeforge and you have fairly current packaging in the > quakeforge-current tree in their cvs. I remember that when knghtbrd > decided to remove quakeforge packages from debian, it was because of > technical problems with the state of the quakeforge codebase, and, it > seemed to me, because of political type problems as well. Somewhat. The old QuakeForge packages were genuinely broken and segfaulted on start for a number of people. I could have tried to track down the problem, but was not willing to do that given the work involved to patch up a dead codebase. If QuakeForge still has no menus nor dependencies/fallbacks for the dozens of libraries it uses, I maintain my opinion that it's not ready to package yet. Still, whether and what to package is not my call and I'll defer to Jeff's judgement of the state of readiness of the project. The library problem could be mitigated somewhat by using debconf to write out a global default config. The menus were removed ages ago under the pretense that they would be replaced soon - that mistake was mine, but the code should still contain comments containing "MENU" or similar. Putting that back the way it was should be a simple task. The existing packages were an odd mishmash of two seperate yet equally broken and incompatible ways to mate the engine with its data. Since then, both have become obsolete. All new versions of QuakeForge support a set of Cvars for defining the locations of gamedata and which game to use by default (which allows for shareware and full gamedata to be installed at the same time without hacks, along with any other full TC you like..) It's also worthwhile to point out that this system can be applied to any and every Quake engine in a matter of ten minutes. I've written a sort of annotated diff which passes for a "tutorial" in the Quake community on how to implement similar features in all engines. > I don't care about the politics, I just think that it is crazy that > several old releases of debian shipped with non-free quake, potato > released with a working set of quakeforge packages, and woody looks like > it's going to release without quake at all. Unless you have plans to > slip quakeforge debs into it RSN, that is. There are a few other engines for Linux in various stages of stability including the one Zephaniah Hull and I have been working on, but none of them have the combination of Linux, NetQuake and QuakeWorld, and software rendering in the same project. For that reason if for none other, I would like to see working QuakeForge packages in Debian. That's the point though, working packages. I've been asked about Project Twilight packages a few times, but I don't even want to consider that until 0.2 is released. We're close to that, but there's a couple of bug reports still and rushing to get packages in before freeze is why the old Debian QuakeForge packages were so bad in the first places. If it's not done in time for freeze, it's not. We are very close though, I can count the number of things to do before release on one hand. > Years ago, I used to maintain those non-free, binary-only packages, and > I didn't pass on maintainence with the expectation that quake would be > removed from the archive entirely later down the line. I would rather > see those nasty old packages copied from hamm (or was it rexx) woody > than see a woody release with no quake at all. I'd much rather see > quakeforge or some other quake code base in contrib[2]. > > Can we do something about this? Those nasty old packages (libc5) are not necessary as I had permission to distribute the glibc2 binaries which were made for Quake: The Offering for Linux. I could also fix up SDLQuake for SDL 1.2, OpenGL, and QW support if need be. That at least I can apply -sharedir and -gamename switches to so that nasty symlink trees are not needed. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> <-- That boy needs therapy "What is striking, however, is the general layout and integration of the system. Debian is a truly elegant Linux distribution; great care has been taken in the preparation of packages and their placement within the system. The sheer number of packages available is also impressive...."
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