On Sat, 2011-07-16 at 01:31 +0200, Arno Töll wrote: > Hi Christopher, > > On 16.07.2011 00:20, Christopher Baines wrote: > > The actual package would just contain the rules and checksums for the > > files it tries to fetch, but not the data itself, I think of this as a > > symbolic package. This approach in my opinion, would make packaging > > applications like FlightGear much easier, and improve the user > > experience. > > just as a random alternative idea (where other people may judge whether > it is a good idea or not): There might still be benefits of letting dpkg > handle the installation stuff, even if you don't want to have such a > large amount of data in the archives. > > This eases maintenance, updates and clean removal of packages. For your > purpose it might be worth to consider a half baked solution. For example > you could provide a meta package [*] which builds a new binary package > on the installation site. Without knowing anything about FlightGear this > potentially seems a good solution to me. Your meta package could > download your stuff, apply some checksumming and then produce a new > binary package with the actual game data. > > Take a look into the google-earth package for an example what I'm > thinking about. Their use case is of course different than yours, but > the idea is the same. > > This binary package may ease installation, transportation and copying of > your game's data. By using some nifty dependencies along with > "Provides"/"Replaces" relationships you could even do some interesting > dependency magic there, although the direct usage of "dpkg" makes it a > bit tricky to benefit from it. > > [*] please don't confuse my usage of "meta package" with its > archive-wide meaning for Debian here. I would consider the best solution to be a mixture of the two, so the symbolic package handles fetching the data, but then tells dpkg what files its putting where. I definitely think that it would be useful to be able to take a symbolic package, and turn it in to a normal package, but if you don’t want the package, just the stuff on your system, there should just be a way skip out the package (this is mainly for space, because if someone has just enough room for the actual installation, you don’t want to waste space giving them a package as well. Chris
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