Bug#451668: Reply not resent to maintainer
Jordà Polo <jorda@ettin.org> writes:
> A few days ago I replied[1] to a lintian bug that was already closed
> (#451668). For some reason the message wasn't sent to the maintainer, or
> at least it doesn't appear in the mailing list archive[2].
Yeah, the mailing list seemed to lose a bunch of mail recently, including
new bugs. I'm not sure what to make of that.
> I'm not sure my reply is worth a new bug report, and I don't want to
> duplicate information unnecessarily either. But since it is hardly
> visible as it is, I just wanted to make sure that at least someone was
> aware of it.
Thank you!
My personal feeling is that binaries that support games (level editors,
level converters, data manipulators) should also go into /usr/games.
Rationale: the purpose of the /usr/games split is so that system
administrators can easily partition off game-related files, delete them en
masse if need be, not put game binaries on some user paths, etc. The
supporting binaries for games are in that sense even less part of the
"main system" than the game itself; if the game itself is relegated to
/usr/games, it doesn't make sense to me to give its level editor a higher
visibility than the game.
It's much murkier when a game also ships a general utility, although
that's also a rather odd case and may even be a case where the general
utility should be in a separate package, since installing a game to get a
general utility is very unintuitive.
For those who didn't see the original message, here's the included list:
eboard
/usr/bin/eboard-config - get information about the installed eboard
exult
/usr/bin/expack - manipulate flex files
/usr/bin/exult_studio - world editor
/usr/bin/ipack - manipulate flex files
/usr/bin/shp2pcx - extract images from a shape
/usr/bin/splitshp - split shape files into frames
/usr/bin/textpack - pack/unpack flex files containing text
/usr/bin/ucc - usecode compiler
/usr/bin/ucxt - usecode disassembler
fortune-mod
/usr/bin/strfile - create a random access file for storing strings
/usr/bin/unstr - dump strings in pointer order
jumpnbump
/usr/bin/jumpnbump-pack - create levels
/usr/bin/jumpnbump-unpack - unpack levels
/usr/bin/jumpnbump-gobpack - convert .gob to .pcx
neverball
/usr/bin/mapc - map compiler
pydance
/usr/bin/findbpm - calculate the beats per second of a song
pyracerz
/usr/bin/pyracerz - symlink to /usr/games/pyracerz
xconq
/usr/bin/imf2x - translates image families into bitmaps
/usr/bin/x2imf - converts bitmap images into "portable image family"
/usr/bin/ximfapp - image viewer
I'm pretty comfortable with saying that all of those should really be in
/usr/games and not in /usr/bin, with the possible exception of the xconq
and exult utilities depending on how widespread use of those file formats
is outside of that particular game, and fortune, which is a weird special
case and arguably doesn't belong in games at all.
(The neverball map compiler has an unfortunately generic binary name that
I'd probably change, were I maintaining the package.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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