[Games] Status update

[Richard Hartmann]

Hi all,

as of right now, we have 33 subscribers on this list. Thanks to
everyone, I hope this will be worth your while. In case you missed
the initial discussions, you can catch up on the status quo here[1]
and here [2].

Projects which have been contacted are: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora,
Gentoo, SuSE, FreeBSD. Does it make sense to contact more
distributions/BSDs or do we have all that have a sizeable game
ecosystem covered?
Does any of you have contacts to other interested parties? I wrote
a blurb which got stolen by Barry, re-stolen by me and which
incorporates snippets by Miriam, which you, in turn, are very
welcome to steal yourself[3]. If possible, CC this list so we will
all know where we stand wrt other projects knowing of this list.

Next up are basic infrastructure decissions. I suspect we could
benefit from a wiki of some sort. While the Debian wiki[4] is being
used by Debian & Ubuntu (and I think Fedora, to some extent),
we should probably go for a generic wiki with information. Does
anyone have any preference as to a hosting provider?

Also, while historically we have been using svn a lot, and know
how it works, the distributed nature of this and the fact that we will
need to pull from a lot of places means that we will most likely
give git a chance. It's in use for some Debian games, so
experience does exist.
This has the additional advantage that we could just ditch the
first repo or ten after we know what structures make sense.
We will experiement and we will end up in situations where
starting over is better. On the plus side, all patches will survive
and that is the main thing.

Do we need a bug tracker? Or will the ML and wiki suffice?

One large chunk of work will be to merge the existing patches.
This will be a lot easier for new games as we have a clean slate,
there. With existing patchsets, we will either need to not use
this new system or the relative maintainers get together,
state what their patches do and agree on a common set.


I would ask everyone to write a short blurb about themselves.
Name, distribution[s], packages you are working on, etc. Be
as verbose or short as you like :)

Also, and this is important, if any of you wants to package
any new game, _please_ announce this on the list! Someone
might have done your work for you, already. Or you can work
on stuff together.


The security issue with patches that do not come from your
own distribtution _does_ exist. Every distribution will have to
take care of this themselves. Ideally, all maintainers will verify
all patches they accept. A similar situation does exist with
normal upstream, but we are creating a middle layer with
write permissions for everyone.


Thanks for reading all of this (if you did, that is ;),
Richard

PS: Once again, spread the word. To packagers and
upstream.


[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2008/11/msg00065.html
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/games/2008-November/000006.html
[3] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2008-November/051552.html
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/Games