Bug#635538: mednafen provides several emulators but theres no alternatives system like fceu or similar packages

[Stephen Kitt]

Hi,

On Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:35:11 -0430, PICCORO McKAY Lenz
<mckaygerhard at gmail.com> wrote:
> mednafen provides several emulators but theres no alternatives system like
> fceu emulator or similar.
> 
> The emulator "Mednafen" and the version recently uploaded on experimental
> provides a wide variety of emulations, but this is unknown to users.
> 
> Packages like fceu provides THROUGH system "update-alternatives" links for
> emulted provides "nes" and the manpage respetively, but no Mednafen.
> 
> Mednafen its more flexible and highly configurable, in addition to being
> well documented, and the file configuration are plain editable, too many
> advantages, but does not provide links to the provides emulated ystems by
> alternatives system.

The Debian packages since 0.8.C-1 do provide the nes-emulator virtual package
(as used by efp), and the nes alternative.

> In this email I add scripts prerm and postinst necessary to help improve
> this package in debian, so as venenux will does and massenkoh. Son then can
> added to control the field "Provides : nes-emulator , gg-emulator ,
> sgg-emulator , sms-emulator , pce-emulator , gba-emulator , gbc-emulator ,
> lynx-emulator , ngp-emulator , ngc-emulator , wsc-emulator , lnx-emulator"
> or sometingh like!
> 
> I hope this help improve pakage , i like a link to more emulated system by
> thi emulator,

I can see how this would be useful, especially if other related packages were
also updated. Note though that virtual packages are intended for use by
dependencies (see policy 3.6 and 7.5), so there wouldn't be much point unless
emulated games were provided as packages (in a similar fashion to the efp
package). Adding all the alternatives would also introduce a fair amount of
"namespace polution" in /usr/bin...

What exactly is the problem you're trying to solve? (Or problems...) If it's
making the package easier to discover, the way to do that is by working on
the description. Or do you think it makes things easier to be able to type
	gba ...
rather than
	mednafen ...
etc.? Wouldn't a better solution be to provide handlers for the various MIME
types involved (application/x-nes-rom and so on) so that users can simply
launch their games from their file manager?

> also improve description please! ¬_¬u

Do you have any suggestions? The current descriptions list all the emulated
systems, and apart from expanding some of the acronyms (NES and SNES
especially) I don't see much to improve - but I'm probably wrong!

Thanks for your input,

Stephen