[Games] Status update

[Richard Hartmann]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 23:55, Dmitry Marakasov <amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru> wrote:

> 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].

Does OpenBSD even accept something like this? Do you know
which lists we could contact wrt OpenBSD and Darwin? Arch/AUR
has been/will be contacted by Zhenech.


> 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

> 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 :)

git does not support sub-branch checkouts. What it does support
is meta-repos which can contain a lot of other repos. So if you
only want coolgame, you would clone only that one repo.
Of course, this system may be totally inadequate for some reason
or other which is why we do want encourage people to discuss this.

And we want to be bold. If we need to throw away half a dozen repos,
so what? The real work, the patches, will still be there. And we will
then be able to use a layout, techniques etc which are known to
work for everyone.


> - 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.

We will have one page per game, anyway. This should list
general information as well as the package status and patches
for individual distributions. Again, this is not chiseled in stone,
everyone is free to suggest a totally different scheme.


> 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

This poses a very interesting question: Would you want to
maintain your specific stuff in this repo? I know that Fedora people
can not do this for tool-chain and administrative reasons.
Our plan was to only put the merged patches in the repo (along
with a oldpatches/debian, etc) and have everyone pull into their
own repo from there.

This is a pretty central decission so please give feedback, y'all :)

Again, the best thing would be to just experiment a bit.


> 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.

Yes. We should try to get a system into place with which a code
review by members of at least two projects go over 'final' patches.
We basically trust everyone, but there's no need to be uncautious.

>> 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.'

Yes, agreed. Good point :)


I know Miry is planning to start a test balloon with hex-a-hop soon.
That is packaged for FreeBSD already, so you, Dmitry, might want
to poke jamie at bishopston.net to see if there is any interest in this.
Or the two of you agree on a different game to start playing with.
Yes, pun intended :)


Richard