[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Bug#821260: RFS: python-adventure/1.4-1 [ITP]



Am 20.04.2016 um 00:53 schrieb Ben Finney:
> On 19-Apr-2016, Markus Koschany wrote:
>> thanks for your update. There are only a few things left before we can
>> upload the package.
> 
> Thank you for working with me on this.
> 
>> My main concern is the adventure-common binary package because I
>> don't believe that shipping advent.dat with an extra package is very
>> useful at the moment.
> 
> Would you decline to upload on that basis? I appreciate you don't
> think there's a benefit, but is there any appreciable harm from having
> the ‘adventure-common’ package?
> 
>> I think it is cool to have a modern Python3 version but it would be
>> rather boring to have identical versions that simply reuse the same
>> story from advent.dat.
> 
> My thinking is that the Python 3 package is rather idiosyncratic, and
> that I'd like to make it clear the common files are available for
> different ports from the original Fortran program.
> 
> I'm not going to insist, but I'd like to know whether you think this
> structure is harmful, or only that this isn't the style you would
> choose.

I think the word harmful is a bit too strong but I don't think that your
current approach is beneficial either. The rationale for providing
multiple binary packages is that users should be able to install a
subset of an application and save some disk space. In this case they
always have to install both packages because otherwise the game would be
broken. It would be a different case if they already had a choice and
could choose between different variants.

Games often provide a significant amount of data and media files and
then it really makes sense to split off the data into some arch:all
-data or -common package when the architecture dependent data is small
compared to the arch-indep part. It would have been extremely wasteful,
if I hadn't done that for freeorion. (C++ game, -data package ~150 MB)
but in your case the game is already arch:all instead of arch:any and
adventure-common is even smaller than colossal-cave-adventure. So
another variable must be taken into account: metadata. Every binary
package in Debian's archive produces metadata and _every_ user has to
fetch this information, for instance with apt when doing a daily update.
In your case the performance penalty (even when it's rather small) is
greater than the advantage of having a separate -common package which
could be reused for a potential and not yet packaged adventure variant.

And last but not least the ftp team once rejected an extra -doc package
for the game njam because it was very small and insisted to merge it
into the -data package. The funny part is that my sponsor back then
thought it was a good idea, so the situation was kind of reversed.

I wouldn't decline to upload but you should take this wall of text into
consideration. In my opinion you can always split the package later when
a potential port might require it.

[...]
>> and that we use cgit for better performance.
> 
> Recently, the default browser on Alioth was switched to Cgit. So,
> at <URL:https://anonscm.debian.org/git/collab-maint/dput.git> the Cgit
> browser is presented.

Indeed they redirect all requests now. I don't know if that comes with a
performance penalty though. I wonder why we need two fields, Vcs-Browser
and Vcs-Git, if they are identical...

Regards,

Markus


Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature


Reply to: