Standardizing various games packaging things across distros

[Miriam Ruiz]

2011/5/4 Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 16:48, Bas Wijnen <wijnen at debian.org> wrote:
>
>> I know of people who have an account set up
>> like that exactly because they don't want to play games while studying.
>> (So for study, they log in as the non-game account, but for leisure,
>> they log in as their "normal" account.
>
> Seriously? I always wondered if there's anybody who is using this distinction.
>
> Personally, I have always thought that separate directories are a bad
> idea. There is no /bin/X/ or /bin/networking , either. And for good
> reason.

I agree with you. Even though I can think of some scenarios that might
benefit from the current directory separation, they are too
exceptional to be considered as a serious reason.

> One could argue that data dirs are special. With some games having
> huge data dirs and SSDs on the rise, this could make sense for some
> scenarios.

That might make sense if the distinction was between big data and
small data. There are a lot of games with very small data dirs, and
there are other packages -not games- with big data chunks. If that is
the reason, it seems pretty arbitrary. I guess the reason might be
more along the lines of thinking that games are second class citizens
that are not as important as other packages, and thu the separation in
directories makes it easier to handle their storage differently. As I
say, I can only think of exceptional situations in which that could be
useful, and I know of no one -I knew of no one until now- using that
used that separation for anything.

> Overall, I prefer Fedora's approach. Maybe it's worth bouncing this
> off of debian-devel to get more input? _If_ this is changed, it should
> be changed globally, preferably at the same time for a lot of packages
> at once and become a release goal for next stable.

If there are no serious reasons against it, I'd go for that too.

Greetings,
Miry