Mail from the Ubuntu mame MOTU

Cesare Falco cesare.falco at gmail.com
Wed May 18 10:57:15 UTC 2011


Aloha,

first of all, my apologies for writing in HTML, but it seems I can't
persuade
Gmail to use simple text. Anyone can help? :/

> the source tree in Mess tarball has some directories in common with Mame.
> > I don't remember whether overwrites occur (I had to halt the Mess thing
> for
> > a while due to lack of time), btw I chose to make it short and build them
> in
> > turn.  I'll have a closer look when I'm back home.
>
> The common dirs are easy: docs, which we don't care about, and hash, which
> is full of files in MESS but only has one in MAME. I took care of that by
> symlinking the single MAME file. :)
>

Ok, I finally sorted this out. :)

No dir clashes occur on 0.142, but they *did* in 0.141, when I first started
working on packaging Mess. I also peeked at the unstable series toward 0.143
and it seems they're patching src/emu/ src/mame/ src/osd/sdl and others.
They could also end up as part of the Mame source, but who knows?
It's likely that in the future dir clashes can (if not *will*) occur again,
and we'd
have to revise the dh_auto_build target. :(

I also reviewed my own code, which happens to be different from what I
recalled ;)
* A copy of the (Mame) src/ tree is made to src.Mess/ first,
* the makefile and contents of Mess are then copied in src.Mess/
* build is done inside src.Mess/ (and no particular order is required)

I'd stick with this approach which makes maintainance easier IMHO. :)

 > I thought about it a lot, we can take for granted what the Mame/Mess team
> > say or we can write some kind of parsing tool. I see no other ways. :(
>
> Parsing with some grep + regexp hack might help us, but we will always
> need to have some manual editing I guess. Geez, thinking about this makes
> me sick. :)
>
...see you in the toilet. I'll already be there... :D


> >    + all tools are in a single mame-tools package
> >      - pros: probably easier to maintain in the future; no redundancy
> >      - cons: the user can't tell which is which anymore
>
> I vote for this one! :)
>
Me too. ;)

I thought about it and agree that we shouldn't bother, Mame and Mess
could eventually share all of them. If not, they're still not so relevant
for
the user, after all.

Anyone else?

 > great!
> > I'm attaching my full debian dir. It's only ~30k bzipped so I hope it
> won't
>


> OK, I see there area major differences by now in both trees. Cesare, how
> do you think we should manage the delta? I'm not sure how ubuntu works,
>
It's rather simple: we have to choose. :)

I've just subscribed the list and I don't know about the team inner working.
I understand Jordi and Manu are the team leaders, am I right?
Should I commit my proposals to the repos?
Do you prefer to discuss them first?


> but the policy is to prefer not have "ubuntu" changes if possible, right?
>
Indeed it is.


> Would it work for you if the Ubuntu archive synced our package with, if
> necessary, the extra bits you need for a transition? For example, I see
>
I think we should go exactly in that direction. :)


> you have sdlmame packages for transition that you'd need to keep until a
> new Ubuntu release happens, etc.
>
I'm considering dropping them as transition should be completed for all
users after a year or so. ;)

Also, there's mame-common. Would you mind elaborating what that is for? Is
> it to hold those files that both mame and mess can use? (keymaps, etc I
> guess?).
>
Right. It started to ease packaging of other derivatives (namely Wolfmame),
as they are not alternatives, strictly speaking. They could even share the
same mame.ini as I see no reasons for using different configurations.
We can consider alternatives as well.


> think the upstream way of dealing with the mess source code is a bit
> horrible. I think mess and mame should simply merge into a single project.
> :)
>
I agree to both. ;)

I guess we won't see the merge anyway, for both historical and philosophical
reasons. Mame started first, aimed at arcade machines *only*.
Later someone thought about adding home systems, and so Mess was born.

Cheers,
Cesare.
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