Re: Packaging minetest mods
On 7/16/20 5:44 PM, Sean Whitton wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Thu 16 Jul 2020 at 05:17PM +02, Julien Puydt wrote:
>>
>> I have packaged a few mods for the minetest game these last years.
>> Recent minetest versions have a feature where you can download mods
>> directly online.
>>
>> So the questions are :
>>
>> (1) should I go on updating the existing packages? or ask for their
>> removal? orphan them? whatever?
>>
>> (2) should I go on packaging new things for minetest?
>
> This is pretty much the same situation with Emacs addons -- it can
> download them itself now, but we still package plenty of them in the
> archive.
>
> It depends on whether you think it is still valuable to have them in
> Debian. Are there reasons why someone might prefer to install the
> version from Debian, or will they always want the latest and greatest
> upstream version?
I really appreciate having the mods packaged in Debian packages. In the
specific case of Minetest, there is at least some extra value in having
them packaged, because in contrast to the client, the minetest-server
doesn't have any kind of integration or tooling to interact with the
contentdb service that is used for the distribution of these mods [0]. I
perceive installing the mods by hand inconvenient.
I think this would also be an opportunity to think about creating some
tooling that supports the initial generation and updating of the
packages by fetching the version information and archives from the
contentdb API [1]. Might be useful for watching new releases. It also
allows for extracting some metadata automatically, such as dependencies
or compatible Minetest versions, and use these for generating parts of
the control file. That would probably facilitate the maintenance of
these packages.
--
[0] https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/7358
[1] https://content.minetest.net/help/api/
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