On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 11:03:57AM +0100, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
> Jon Dowland wrote:
>> A brief explanation as to their meaning. Doom games are
>> divided into engine and world-resource components. The
>> former is captured by 'doom-engine'.
>
> I don't understand why we need a 'doom-engine' virtual package.
> [i.e.: avoid circular dependencies].
>
> IMHO, a user will select an engine, not data.
>
>> The latter is covered
>> by two different names, 'boom-wad' and 'doom-wad'.
>
> I'm confused. A single virtual package ('doom-engine')
> should handle two incompatibles engines?
>
> I've also some problem understanding the utility of
> such ('boom-wad' and 'doom-wad') virtual package,
> because of the way of common package manager interfaces.
>
> People tend to use the default value on dependencies.
> (to much use of 'apt-get')
> Virtual package are not normally used to allow multiple
> selections.
>
> I see the problem, but I'm not sure that virtual package
> are the right solution, but also I don't see an alternative.
>
> Could you provide an example of use of these new virtual
> package, and the common use (what user select and should
> expect)?
Ok certainly
* user installs freedoom, which is not useful without
an engine, so depends: doom-engine. prboom is the
only provider of doom-engine, so gets pulled in.
Running "doom" works, due to alternatives, and
working menu entries are present.
* same for doom-wad-shareware (in nonfree) or freedm
instead of freedoom
* User installs an engine instead, which recommends:
doom-wad | boom-wad (in prboom's case) which is
satisfied by either freedm or freedoom in main (both
binary packages of freedoom) and so one gets pulled in
if their apt is factory default.
* If a user has configured their apt to not install
recommends, they can get an engine w/o data which is
mostly useless. The reason for this is it could be
argued that the engine can be used if a user creates
their own data from scratch (or provides the
commercial game data). We often got complaints
(although never a bug report) that users had to
install freedoom to play doom (which isn't strictly
true, they didn't know about game-data-packager) so
after apt changed behaviour we moved that
dependency to recommends:.
* User owns commercial doom games, installs
game-data-packager, builds a .deb containing their
commercial data which recommends: doom-engine;
installs this deb using gdebi (say) and get a
doom-engine pulled in or dpkg and not.
As you correctly point out in another email, with a non-boom
compatible package providing doom-engine, this current
situation could result in someone installing freedoom,
getting a non-boom compatible engine and an unplayable
combination. So, a boom-engine is also needed.
> BTW 'boom-wad' and 'doom-wad' are visually very confusing:
> could you use 'boom-extended-wad', 'doom-classic-wad',
> or something less confusing?
Yes, I suppose they are. We could certainly change them,
but it would require a small package transition inside
Debian (currently prboom, deutex, freedoom,
game-data-packager, doom-wad-shareware (nonfree)) and
some external repositories. If we are to do this I'd like
to change the -wad suffix to -iwad, at least, which is more
descriptive too ('wad' could refer to 'pwad' where p ==
patch, i.e. not a full game world)
--
Jon Dowland
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