Bug#559132: Should prboom be replaced by prboom-plus?

[Dave Witbrodt]

Package: prboom
Version: 2:2.5.0+dfsg1-5
Severity: wishlist


I've been using using 'prboom' for years to kill stress.  I was
disappointed when I moved from a 4:3 monitor to a widescreen monitor
that prboom did not take advantage of the 16:10 screen ratio to display
more of the virtual world inside the game.  Instead, it merely stretched
the old field of view to fit the new resolution.

At that time (maybe a couple of years ago) I looked around for a smarter
replacement for prboom, but gave up pretty quickly and left prboom
installed.  I remember discovering 'prboom+', and saw some claims in its
changelog that it did more with widescreen monitors than ordinary
'prboom' did.  I assumed (wrongly) that 'prboom+' would be picked up by
Debian.

Lately, I've been experimenting with getting open source 2D/3D
acceleration for my new Radeon card.  I had some problems with OpenGL,
but those have been fixed (for the 'radeon' driver, though not the
'radeonhd' driver.  I was using 'prboom' as one of my test apps for
OpenGL... and I remembered about wanting to try 'prboom+' a long time
ago.

I finally looked around to check the status of things.  I downloaded the
Debian source packages for 'prboom', then located the 'prboom-plus'
sources here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom-plus/files/

It looks like 'debian/watch' is out of date in 'prboom', but I was able
to find 'prboom' sources here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom/files/

I'm planning to borrow the 'debian' directory from the current 'prboom'
and fix it up to build DEBs of 'prboom-plus' this weekend.  The sources
are very similar, but if you look at the dates on those website I listed
you will see that 'prboom' is getting stale (a year old now) while
'prboom-plus' had a 2.5.0.5 release on 2009-11-14.

As my subject line suggested above, it looks to me like 'prboom-plus' is
a better candidate for packaging at this point, if judged by recent
activity upstream.  (I cannot judge by quality, however, since I have
not built and tested 'prboom-plus' yet myself.)

Please accept this wishlist bug as a request for comments, and not as a
complaint or a demand that 'prboom-plus' be packaged.  I just wanted to
send an FYI, and get some feedback from the maintainers.


Thanks,
Dave W.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (350, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-rc8-0git091120.desktop.uvesafb (SMP w/4 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages prboom depends on:
ii  libc6           2.10.2-2                 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libgl1-mesa-glx 7.7-0+git37676b39-091115 A free implementation of the OpenG
ii  libglu1-mesa [l 7.7-0+git37676b39-091115 The OpenGL utility library (GLU)
ii  libsdl-mixer1.2 1.2.8-6+b1               mixer library for Simple DirectMed
ii  libsdl-net1.2   1.2.7-2                  network library for Simple DirectM
ii  libsdl1.2debian 1.2.13-5                 Simple DirectMedia Layer

Versions of packages prboom recommends:
ii  doom-wad-shareware [doom-wad] 1.9-1.1    Shareware game files for the 3D ga
ii  freedoom [boom-wad]           0.6.4-4    free game files for the 3D game DO
ii  timidity                      2.13.2-36  Software sound renderer (MIDI sequ

Versions of packages prboom suggests:
pn  game-data-packager            <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information