join++

[Mike Furr]

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Hello,

I've been meaning to join this list since the original announcement on
- -devel and finally gotten around to doing so (and reading the
archives).  I maintain a couple of games in debian: chromium and
vegastrike as well as sdl-net which is used by a hand full of packages
including wesnoth.

What you have discussed so far sounds promising and thought I would join
the project.  As games can be fairly complex, I wouldn't mind having
some help maintaining mine.  Chromium hasn't seen any development in the
last few years since its basically a complete, polished game and doesn't
require much effort to maintain (other than the occasional humorous bug
report like 261970 and the infamous 177244).

Vegastrike on the other hand could use a little more love than I
currently give it. :) Its a beast.  The last time I checked, the -data
package was the single largest binary package in the archive and the
music package was in the top 10 which means new releases require a
*lengthly* upload.  The main package frequently brings buildds to their
knees, always discovers any current toolchain bugs or fails due to the
latest c++-compliance changes from gcc.  However, its quite actively
developed upstream and has a fairly large user base, not to mention
being a lot of fun to play!  If others are interested in helping out
with its maintenance, I can import the packages into svn.

As for package maintenance, I use dpatch for most of my packages because
I've found that after maintaining packages for several years, its great
having separated patches which can each have a comment as to why they
are there (and also makes its easy when upstream accepts some patches,
but not others). Vegastrike uses a home-grown kind of system since it
has multiple tarballs and a bunch of patches and I packaged it before
dpatch and cdbs matured.  As for svn, I am part of the OCaml packaging
team and we use svn for all of our packages as well as for policy
documents and random helper scripts/tools.  Thus far, it has worked out
great.  We currently have over 90 packages in svn and ~20 members, about
half of which actively commit.  We use a top level trunk/ tags/
branches/ style similar to what you guys seem to have settled on and I
would encourage staying with it since it makes checking out/updating
trunk/ a lot faster.  I personally don't care for svn-buildpackage but
many others seem to like it.

Cheers,
- -Mike


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