Invitation to a cross-distro games packaging/patching/maintaining mailing list

[Miriam Ruiz]

2008/11/28 Dmitry Marakasov <amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru>:
> * Miriam Ruiz (miriam at debian.org) wrote:
>
>> > shotgun debugger (http://www.gamecreation.org/games/shotgun-debugger)
>> > very nice, though for some reason no widely known top-down action game
>> > with full singleplayer compaing, polished graphics and nice music.
>> > Changes are datadir support.
>> I packaged this one for Debian some time ago, but never put it into
>> the Distro. It still has to be patched so that models are loaded
>> properly, instead of having two different sets of models, one foe
>> big-endian and a different one for little-endian platforms.
> This is interesting. While FreeBSD build cluster build sdb package
> from sparc64, I don't think anyone actually played it, so we may
> have a problem. Can you describe it in short? As I understand,
> there's separate package for sdb bigendian models - what's the
> source for those? Patched original models? If yes, how to patch them?

I downloaded them from the web page directly, I still have the
original .zip file, in case you're interested. I really don't know it
it's still online, to be honest.

This is the README I have based on the text that was in their web page:

"""
Shotgun Debugger uses the MD2 format for its 3D models. MD2 is a binary
format, and is thus prone to endianness incompatibility.

The models that come with the Shotgun Debugger packages will work on
little-endian architectures (Intel x86, AMD64, etc.) only. If you plan on
playing Shotgun Debugger on a big-endian system (PowerPC*, SPARC, etc.),
you will need to use the big-endian model pack. These models have the
.md2b extension; all that is need to be done is to put them in the models/
directory. Shotgun Debugger recognizes the endianness of the system and
loads the appropriate model set.

* The PowerPC actually contains a hack allowing it to operate in
little-endian mode, but it is essentially big-endian. The PowerPC 970 is
purely big-endian.
"""

>> I packaged this one too, but I never put it into Debian because I
>> never found the time to make a man page:
> Are man pages required for all debian packages?

Yup, but they can be simple and refer to more extensive documentation
in other formats, for example HTML

The idea, AFAIK, is to be able to make man command to be able to know
what command does before executing it, in every case.

>> There's also a similar game called called xspringies
> Nice, gotta check this out. The port is there but seems like it needs
> updating.

:)

Greetings,
Miry