Bug#1057483: alex4 depends on alex4-data but is NBS

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 05 Dec 2023 at 10:56:06 -0800, Chris Peterson wrote:
> My assumption is that the answer to (2) is yes, and game-data-packager
> is meant to fully replace alex4-data. In this case my suggestion is to
> drop alex4-data from Depends

The way this has generally been handled in the past is to depend on

 foo-data (>= some suitable version) | game-data-packager

so that if a user has used g-d-p to prepare a suitable version of foo-data
on another machine (perhaps a more powerful one) and installed it on the
current machine, they aren't forced to install game-data-packager and
all of its dependencies for no good reason. It seems that this matches
what Alexandre has done in alex4.

This was discussed with the Debian ftp team while packaging some of the
other games supported by game-data-packager (I can't remember which one,
perhaps iortcw or openjk) and they consider this dependency structure
to be a valid representation of what the game really needs.

I agree that alex4-data should be removed from the archive as NBS,
but that's a matter for the ftp team rather than the package maintainer.

    smcv