[Pkg-games-devel] Re: Debian Games Team

[Gerfried Fuchs]

* Miriam Ruiz <little_miry at yahoo.es> [2006-01-13 01:07]:
> We've been recently talking about creating a group to maintain games
> in Debian in a collaborative way. As a starting point, I've created a
> mailing list in alioth for coordination, and also for create
> discussion threads about the main problems related to game development
> and games packages in Debian. You can join that list at:

 Great. Joined the list (so you can skip Ccing me on replies). :)

 A bit about myself: I'm regularly accused of maintaining only games in
Debian; in fact I can't fully decline it (netris, tetrinet, xblast,
xblast-tnt so far, ITP for qcake (though that's not a game itself but a
game builder, I got sponsored with a 3d graphics card for doing it :))
and freepop pending, and I plan to work on planeshift; do some work on
wesnoth (though just a bit translation work, isaac is doing a great job
here) and got offered to co-maintain wasteland. And then there is
sponsored fillets-ng...). Though I like to notice that my other packages
mean just as much to me, just in case. :)

> - Quick-fixing of security issues common to games.

 Yes, was struck by one of those with respect to xblast/xblast-tnt and
the sound server... Though it doesn't run privileges, no too bad harm
done.

> - Discussion of problems and facts relative to game packaging.

 About the setgid games mentioned earlier in the thread: I'd think it's
time to switch from setgid games to setgid <packagename> and create a
group for each game that wants global highscores. That way a bug in one
package can't affect the highscores/savegames/whatever of the other
games.

> - Discussion of how to DFGS might be interpreted regarding multimedia
> contents and artwork in games.

 This is very important to me with respect to planeshift: Where the
codebase itself is DFSG free (GPLed) the artwork they use on their
gameservers isn't. So a it might need to go to contrib due to that. Or,
use some different artwork stuff that is free. I was informed about a
quite interesting thing that uses the planeshift code which I already
got informed that it's free[1], but also that it used some code
packages, besides that it was so far only used/tested on windows....
Just to get all the facts so far across if someone is interested in
planeshift themselfes.

 Oh, and then I tried to package mangband because I was interested in a
multiplayer angband/rogue like game. Keep your fingers off that piece!
It's... "hot". I mean... yuck. Three different licences, each a
contradiction with each other, so one might not even be legally allowed
to download it anywhere in a single package as source....  So far my
contribution for the unable-to-package list. :)

> - Make it easier for users to know the games available in Debian,
> maybe with some game selector interface, a web page, screenshots or
> whatever.

 Very good idea. :)

 So long for now,
Alfie
[1] <http://www.reflex.lth.se/culture/annelov/?lang=en>
-- 
<Alfie> Von sid wirds nie ein netinst geben.
<hygl> Alfie: darf ich dich damit zitieren, wenn sid stable ist?
                    -- #debian.de
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