Re: RFS: flare

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

On 08/22/2011 07:47 PM, Jan-Hendrik (hennr) Peters wrote:
> Dear mentors,
>
> I am looking for a sponsor for my package "flare".
> It's a diablo like rpg game with complete free art and code.
> This is my first package, hope it's ok ;)
>
> See details:
>
>  * Package name    : flare
>    Version         : 0.14.1-1
>    Upstream Author : Clint Bellanger
>  * URL             : http://clintbellanger.net/rpg/
>  * License         : GPL and CC-BY-SA
>    Section         : games
>
> To access further information about this package, please visit the
> following URL:
>
>   http://mentors.debian.net/package/flare
>
> Alternatively, one can download the package with dget using this command:
>
>   dget -x
> http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/f/flare/flare_0.14.1-1.dsc
>   
Hi,

I have no intention of sponsoring this game, I think it's best if I
leave this task to
people from the Game team, however, I had a quick look out of curiosity.
I wanted
to know what type of game it was, but ... I couldn't tell by just
reading the
description.

Description: FOSS single-player 2D action RPG engine

First, in your short description, remove "FOSS". OF COURSE this is a
free and
open source software, absolutely all software in Debian are, but we
don't write
"FOSS" in all short descriptions of all packages.

Then, your long description reads:

<snip>
 Flare is not a reimplementation of an existing game or engine.
 It is a tribute to and exploration of the action RPG genre.
 .
 Rather than building a very abstract, robust game engine, the goal of
 this project is to build several real games and harvest an engine from
  the common, reusable code. The first game, in progress, is a
  fantasy dungeon crawl.
 .
 Flare uses simple file formats (INI style config files) for most of the
  game data, allowing anyone to easily modify game contents.
  Open formats are preferred (png, ogg).
  The game code is C++ and is released under the GPL v3;
  the game art is CC-BY-SA 3.0
</snap>

Your long description doesn't tell at all what type of game it is. It
tells about
the engine which is used, what type of config files the project users,
and what
license the software is being released in. Is this a game??? Now that I
read the
long description, I have doubts.

So, please rewrite completely the short and long description take care
of the
following:
- do not tell about any copyright thing, everything about that should be
written
in debian/copyright, that's the only place where it belongs
- write it for people like me: who don't know anything about the project, or
any other types of games. I might well not know what "RPG" means, but I
should still be able to understand what I'm going to download. Please do not
write "a Diablo like game", because people (like me) might not know Diablo
(in fact, that's why I was curious: I wanted to know what Diablo was...).
- by reading the long desc. I should be able to know a lot already about
what
my gaming experience with "flare", and what to expect.
- do not write about the config files, that's something that should go
into the
README.Debian or something similar (somewhere in /usr/share/doc/flare, in
the manpage, or something like that...).

Also, in your debian/copyright, you attempted to use the DEP5 format, and
you did a good formatting for the GPL-3.0+ license. I guess you took that
from another package, right? But later, on your CC-BY-SA-3.0 license is not
well formatted, it goes below the 80th column, has blank lines, etc. It
would
be also great to mention http://clintbellanger.net/contact.php, which is the
way to contact the author.

There might be other issues, I didn't look further.

Thanks for your contribution to Debian,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)