Bug#862698: ITP: minecraft -- blocks to build anything you can imagine
On Mon, 15 May 2017 at 18:40:34 -0300, Carlos Donizete Froes wrote:
> * Package name : minecraft
> Version : 0.1
> Upstream Author : Carlos Donizete Froes <coringao@riseup.net>
> * URL : https://minecraft.net
> * License : BSD-2-Clause
> Programming Lang: Shell
This information does not seem consistent with what I know about
Minecraft, which is that it is proprietary software, available for
purchase (not even free-as-in-free-beer), originally written by Mojang AB,
now owned by Microsoft, written in Java, and currently versioned 1.11.2.
If what you mean is that you will be writing a "launcher" package in contrib
similar to the steam package, please give the package a description (and
perhaps name) that indicates that. The description in this ITP seems
very misleading.
You might find it useful to look at (for example) the quake, freespace2
and game-data-packager packages for examples of dealing with
non-distributable game data. I don't think we have permission to
redistribute anything from Minecraft, not even the small,
infrequently-updated launcher that downloads, updates and runs the
more-frequently-updated game, unless Microsoft has changed the policy
that Mojang AB historically had (analogous to how Valve encourage
redistribution of the stub that downloads and launches Steam, which is
what's actually in our steam package).
If this package downloads proprietary files automatically, here are some
issues that should be considered:
* minimizing amount of code run as root (downloading the Minecraft
launcher per-user is probably better - the launcher will download
Minecraft itself once per user anyway, so sharing files between users
to reduce disk space usage is not straightforward)
* not executing code that was not obtained in a way that can be trusted:
downloading via https with correct certificate validation, or checking
the launcher against known-good cryptographic hashes like
game-data-packager does, or similar
* not preventing offline apt updates in which packages are downloaded
while online, then installed at a later time without Internet access
game-data-packager/doc/why.mdwn might be interesting reading.
https://github.com/endlessm/flatpak-minecraft is an alternative approach
to making Minecraft more straightforward to install on a Debian derivative,
although it would be nice if we could use a Debian-based runtime that
included the OpenJDK JRE from Debian (building Debian-based Flatpak
runtimes is something I want to work on, but I haven't got there yet).
Regards,
S
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