Standardizing various games packaging things across distros

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 05/04/2011 11:49 PM, Jon Dowland wrote:
> On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 11:43:26PM +0200, Miriam Ruiz wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> What are the serious reasons for it?  What advantages are there in aligning
> with Fedora (and going against the FHS)?  The cost is -- at least -- changing
> all our packages (DDPO puts that at 265).
>

I'm not advocating anyone changes existing packages, esp. not all at once.
I see no reason why packages could not be moved over one at a time. Likely
both schemes are already in use at the same time already, even in Debian.
For example the gnome-games games use /usr/bin and /usr/share not
/usr/games and /usr/share/games, and I doubt that is different in Debian
(I have not checked), likewise for kde games.

My main reason for starting this discussion is to come to some sort
of agreement which form is the preferred form, so that we can have
some "how to be a good games upstream" webpage which addresses some
game specific things. I would like such a webpage to contain advice
for upstream what to use for the various ambiguities I've pointed
out in my first mail.

Currently various upstreams handle these things in different ways and
we all end up patching some of them to handle things in the way
preferred by our distro.

> I'd like to hear from some other distros to see who else does what before
> considering such a move.
>

Agreed, I would love to get some input on this from other distros too.
I propose that if we can get some sort of agreement between the people
now actively involved we create a "how to be a good games upstream"
wiki page on freedesktop.org, with a list at the bottoms which distro's
have made / agree with the rules listed. Then we can send an announcement
to lwn.net and a few others, and hopefully get more distro's to sign,
or restart the discussion.

Regards,

Hans