On 23/04/13 10:48, Laszlo Kajan wrote:
> free packages that depend on big (e.g. >400MB) free data outside 'main'
This comes up in the Games Team, too.
Here are some possibilities you might not have considered:
* Package a small "demo" data-set (enough to test that the package is
working correctly) in main; provide instructions to get the
"full-fat" data-set from elsewhere. I think VegaStrike used to do
this with its music, shipping a lower-quality encode in Debian and a
full-quality encode elsewhere? Games also often do this for legal
rather than size reasons, with an engine in contrib, demo/shareware
data in non-free, and instructions to replace the demo data with the
non-distributable full game if you own it; e.g. Quake II used to be
packaged like this.
* Split the data-set into reasonably-sized packages so it at least
gets better incremental downloads and splitting between CDs/DVDs
(bonus points if the source packages are segregated by update
frequency, so only the frequently-updated parts normally need
uploads). I did this with openarena-data (after some brief discussion
with the ftp-masters and the debian-cd maintainer) because I was sick
of uploading half a gigabyte of textures, etc. every time there was a
bug in the game scripting. They suggested that I should aim for 100MB
packages as a reasonable compromise between splitting too coarsely
and too finely.
One of these days I might try to construct a "demo" build of OpenArena
(2 player models, 2 levels and all the weapons, or something;
incompatible with "the real OpenArena" for network games, but running on
the same engine, and considerably smaller).
S
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