[gmail] -data files

[Gerfried Fuchs]

* Miriam Ruiz <little_miry at yahoo.es> [2006-02-16 10:49]:
> That's one of the question I was asking. In some of my packages, an
> arch package with the binaries and an arch-independent package with
> the data is generated from the same source package. Data files are
> often much larger than binary files, but changes in the debian release
> usually affect only the binary part (bug corrections or so). When a
> new debian release is done, a new data file is generated, which
> contents are exactly the same as the previous version.

 Try to convince upstream to produce seperated tarballs for code and for
the data files. It was possible to do that for fillets-ng and
xblast-tnt, I guess it should be more than possible for others, too.

 But even if you it comes in one tarball you should try to not depend in
the binary package on the exact version of the data package, but rather
on a ranged version, like >= $upsteamversion.

> What I mean is, for example, to have a 100Kb game with 4Mb data file,
> and correcting a bug in the source code of the game makes the user
> download the 4Mb too, which is exactly equal to the data she/he had.

 If it's in the same source package you can't really completely avoid
it, but with the above mentioned trick at least allow those people
checking to be able to do that.

> What do you think would be the best way to handle this? Maybe
> releasing different binary versions of both? maybe repackaging the
> game and creating two different source packages for the game and the
> data?

 Having different source packages for the data (platform independent,
hopefully) and the binaries is definitely the way to go, and convincing
upstream is the sane way to achieve that.

 So long,
Alfie
-- 
Außerdem noch [..] die Distribution für Puristen, denen technische
Eleganz und Qualität und philosophisch reine Lehre der `freien Software'
über totale Einfachheit geht (Debian) und viele mehr.
        -- Anselm Lingnau in de.comp.os.unix.discussion
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