[Games] Status update

[Dmitry Marakasov]

* Richard Hartmann (richih.mailinglist at gmail.com) wrote:

> 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?
After you've mailed to pkgsrc maillist, the only repositories known
to me which are left are OpenBSD ports [1] and Darwin ports [2].
Those two have under 200 games each (see [5]), but still I think
they're worth contacting. Also I've heard of some distro(s?) with
it's own source-based ports system, and I believe that was Arch
with it's AUR [3]. Search shows it has 889 games as of now, so I
guess it's worth contacting as well [4].

> 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.
If there is a repository planned, I personally don't care what it
will be. I don't see a need for DVCS. Afaik, partial checkouts are
not always available with distributed systems, and SVN makes it
easy to get a single patchset (see proposed repo layout below) like

svn co|export http://foo/coolgame/freebsd-gcc4fix .

and get all files. I may be wrong that git doesn't support it however,
and merging capabilities of modern DVCS may be useful. Well, we can try
and fail as many times as we want as long as we don't lose the repo :)

> Do we need a bug tracker? Or will the ML and wiki suffice?
Actually it looks like will need repository (for holding patches),
wiki (for descriptions of what and how the patches do) and tracker
(for todo, bugs and feature requests) altogether. But it'll be too
much work to integrate them all with each other and that'll be too
hard to use, so my opinion is:
- tracker is not needed. Wiki can hold todo's, bugs and caveats
  perfectly.
- seems like wiki+repo will do the thing nicely with minimal
  integration required - for example, it should automatically create
  a preformatted page for every game stored in the repo.

> 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.
The first thing is to agree on repo layout. For the beginning (as
we need to merge all useful patches we've got with as little
interference as possible) I propose the folowing thing: the first
level is a game name, the second is a name of patchset in the form
of ${DISTRO}-${DESCR}, the third is the patch files themselves.

So the layout I propos is as follows:

tuxracer/
  freebsd-64bit-support/
    patch-src-main.c
    patch-src-engine-number.c
    patch-src-engine-string.c
  ubuntu-dotdir-fix/
    dotdirfix.patch
xmines/
  gentoo-powerpc-fix/
    ppc.diff
  debian-gcc4x-fix/
    patch-1
    patch-2

etc.

The wiki integration script (maybe implemented as commit hook)
should just ensure that the wiki has a page for each game, and that
page has a section for each patchset. That seem to be like couple
dozen lines of perl/python.

After that, we may slowly begin to merge things proven to be useful
everywhere into one patchset (i.e. debian-gcc4x-fix + gentoo-gcc4x-fix
-> common-gcc4x-fix), leaving os/distro specific fixes as they were.

Trivial merging (two or more similar patchsets, or just renaming
distro-specific patchset to common-something) may be just done by
whomever interested, more complex tasks (like where there are
different ways to fix a problem) should be discussed in the maillist.

> 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 :)
Dmitry Marakasov (AMDmi3), FreeBSD.
I'm currently maintaining 107 game ports of which I myself have ported 88.
Currently working on:

- NAEV (2d space action/rpg) port - it doesn't work properly so there's
  still some debugging to do

- Go Ollie (dunno what it is yet) - need to make a port of tuxcap 2d
  game framework first, then wait game's developers to release
  proper source package.

- some games for spring engine (kernel panic for instance). There are
  bugs here as well.

- I'm planning to buy a new GPU with proper shader support then port
  some games that require it. blocks game, for instance. I think there
  were more, but I don't remember now

- longterm task is to improve joystick support for FreeBSD (in SDL and
  OIS)

Well, actually there are over 300 dirs in my ~/projects/ports, so
there's more than enough work to do :)

Btw, I have a games-related page [5] on FreeBSD wiki, which may be
interesting to subscribers. Includes comparison of games quantity in
major distros, and FreeBSD-related game problems.

> 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.
Agreed, but if I may I'd rephrase it in more recommendative manner,
as it'd be hard to make people follow it. Most of us like to take
all the glory for ourselves after all :)
So more like: `Please do post info about what you're currently working
on, changes required to make it work on your system, bugs encountered
etc. That may be useful for packagers from other os/distros or they
may have some information useful to you.'

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html
[2] http://www.darwinports.com/
[3] http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR
[4] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/aur-general
[5] http://wiki.freebsd.org/DmitryMarakasov/Games

-- 
Dmitry Marakasov   .   55B5 0596 FF1E 8D84 5F56  9510 D35A 80DD F9D2 F77D
amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru  ..:  jabber: amdmi3 at jabber.ru    http://www.amdmi3.ru