Better GoPlay [Was: How to make Debian more attractive for users]
On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 02:09:58PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
>
> The Debian games team created goplay to help users discover games in
> Debian. Perhaps this needs more promotion and more people creating
> screenshots and probably a rewrite to look more flashy.
When I have seen GoPlay I thought: What a cool idea realised in a narrow
minded way. Why do I consider it narrow minded? I'm quoting the FAQ:
Q: How do I submit a screenshot?
A: Send Miriam a 320x240 thumbnail picture in png format.
Since more than one year we have screenshots.debian.net and GoPlay just
sticks to a non-maintainable competition to this great service. Is
there any sense to stick to this instead of simply using
screenshots.debian.net (and advertise this great service in the FAQ to
motivate gamers providing screenshots which can be used in *all*
applications for instance synaptics (and other apt frontends in case
they might support screenshots) as well as the Blends web sentinel?
IMHO this would be a simply reasonable way to go.
An even better way to go in my (perhaps to focussed view) would be if
the pkg-games team would join the Blends effort. (I several times
pinged them for either taking care for Debian Jr or draw this project in
their direction.) In this case they could make profit from screenshots
and more (for instance translations of package descriptions) as it is
demonstrated at the web sentinel pages[1] of this project. The big
advantage of havng this stuff on the web is that you can point people to
it *before* they installed Debian and make it an *argument* for using
Debian. To try goplay you need to have Debian just installed.
So in short: GoPlay is quite cool but done the wrong way. If you would
use screenshots.debian.net as input and would be flexible enough to
handle also other topics than just playing in a reasonable way (either
by enhancing DebTags to somehow match the tasks of the existing Blends
or use the tasks of Blends as a primary package selection and draw the
remaining information from DebTags) this would be really helpful for
Debian in general (and not only for players).
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://blends.alioth.debian.org/junior/tasks/
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http://fam-tille.de
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