On Wed, 07 Jun 2017 at 10:36:17 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > On Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 03:55:48PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > > freedoom | game-data-packager: prboom-plus > > * DEBATABLE: freedoom is too ugly to live, shareware Doom has assets missing > > for running pretty much anything Doom-related (and AFAIK its license > > forbids add-ons). > > freedoom is quite fun, actually, IMHO. I think this should be a Depends > rather than a Recommends, but perhaps there's a way to use a doom engine > without wads? Dunno.
prboom-plus is not useful without Doom-compatible wad files, but maybe you are going to use it to play Doom (shareware or commercial), Freedoom (Free) or Chex Quest (gratis) wad files obtained other than via Debian, so a Depends would be too strong IMO. This is analogous to how we don't give ScummVM a Depends on any particular SCUMM game, and we don't give the darkplaces Quake engine a Depends on either Quake data, OpenQuartz, Nexuiz, Xonotic or any of the various other games it can play (many of them not in Debian). I'm a big fan of distinguishing between the engine and the user-facing "game" when packaging game engines that can potentially play more than one game (as in set of game content with its own gameplay/level design - for instance Quake III Arena, OpenArena and World of Padman are distinct games that that happen to share an engine and the vast majority of their game mechanics). The quake series in contrib exemplify this; there's a mini-policy at <https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-games/game-data-packager.git/tree/debian/q1/policy.txt>. The Debian Doom mini-policy takes a different approach, and considers the engine, not the game content, to be the important user-facing thing. Wolfenstein 3D in Debian contrib is packaged the same way. I personally think that this is misguided, and the user-facing things should be Doom, Doom II, Freedoom etc. Otherwise we have the ridiculous situation that the Doom game content, Freedoom and Chex Quest are treated as essentially equivalent (data to be consumed by a Doom engine), which they are clearly not; and similarly Wolfenstein 3D game content is clearly not equivalent to its sequel Spear of Destiny, or to Super 3D Noah's Ark. In each case a player halfway through completing one of those would be confused and disappointed to get the other after a reinstall :-) > > On the other hand, this is an excuse for Doom engines > > in main. The consensus reached between the ftp team and game packagers seems to be that a game engine packaged like a content-free engine (quakespasm, ioquake3) can go in main if Free data *exists*, even if that Free data is not itself present in Debian. yquake2 is still contrib, because we do not know of any Free data compatible with Quake II engines. However, a game engine packaged *like a game* (e.g. menu entries labelled with the name of the game) clearly needs to depend on appropriate data. For games that are non-distributable (paid-for) like Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Academy, I discussed it with the ftp team and we agreed that "Depends: rtcw-data | game-data-packager" is appropriate for contrib - conceptually, the game depends on either the proprietary data (unsatisfiable within Debian+contrib+non-free), or a way to get it installed to the right place (satisfiable within contrib). S
