Categorising games / keeping zombie status of Debian Jr.

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

recently I had a talk with some DDs in Nürnberg who are partly involved
in Pkg-games and when presenting them the techniques used in Debian Pure
Blends we came up with an idea which might be useful for Pkg-games as
well as keeping the Debian Jr. project in a state which enables further
engagement.

The current situation of Debian Jr. is the following: It was orphaned
1,5 years ago [1] and since then nobody actively cared for the project
(at least nothing which was visible to me).  While I kept some low
maintenance on the metapackages to make sure they do not contain
outdated stuff but I will definitely not put larger amount of time into
this project.  The packages from Debian Junior are just in a bad shape
and the junior-doc package is one example for this[2].

But coming back to the meeting in Nürnberg and the Blends tools I would
like to suggest to the Pkg-Games team considering (mis)using the tools
for their work and perhaps by doing so increasing the visibility of
Pkg-games in general.  I would like you to have a look at the so called
tasks pages of Debian Jr.

    http://blends.alioth.debian.org/junior/tasks/

you will notice that several of these tasks contain games which are in
the focus of Pkg-games and they are just presented in categories. Yes,
it is correct the categories are far from beeing a complete list of what
Debian has currently included thanks to your efforts.  That's actually
the problem that the list of packages was not maintained since about two
years.  But here in the list we have the knowledge about Games in Debian
which is obviosely lacking.

The profit for the Pkg-games team would be to get a (hopefully) useful
view on the open bugs of the categorised packages via

    http://blends.alioth.debian.org/junior/bugs/

At least in other Blends this view turned out to be useful - suggestions
for enhancements are welcome.

What has to be done to get the pages above up to date?  Just have a look
at the files in

   svn://svn.debian.org/svn/blends/projects/junior/trunk/debian-junior/tasks

They are very simple control file like text files mentioning the
packages which are belonging to a task.  After commiting a change to
these files a cron job on Alioth wil care for updating the web pages.
The advantage for Pkg-games might be that you can direct users to
certain categories and they get a nice assembly of games with
(translated) descriptions, screenshots, versioning information, debtags
etc.  IMHO this is a thing which is nice to have for an active team
and it might help to get Debian Jr. up and running again if some
kind soul at least cares for the technical basis.

I really hope that somebody will put some care onto this.

Kind regards and thanks for your attention

     Andreas.

PS: Please CC me, I'm not subscribed to pkg-games.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/08/msg00004.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-jr/2009/12/msg00008.html

-- 
http://fam-tille.de