Bug#776279: please add support for the Doom 2 Master Levels

[Simon McVittie]

On 01/02/15 13:41, Alexandre Detiste wrote:
>> The disadvantage of this set is
>> that all maps are in individual PWADs and often occupy the same map
>> slot, so they need to get loaded and played separately. Ideally, the
>> package g-d-p creates for them comes with a Zenity frontend that allows
>> for selecting one of them and automatically calls 'doom-engine' with the
>> correct '-file' and '-warp' parameters.
> 
> Can you provide the appropriates -file &  -warp parameters for all ther files ?

I would really rather not put any executable code in
game-data-packager-produced packages, beyond what is strictly necessary
for backwards compat (the maintainer scripts that remove old
alternatives) - they cannot be updated automatically, so we should
assume that, in practice, "all" users will have an outdated version of
the game data packages. This means that when we find bugs in executable
code in a g-d-p-produced package, we cannot reliably fix them.

If someone wants to write a generic Doom launcher/frontend and upload it
to contrib separately (analogous to src:quake), that would be fine; we
could make it a Recommends instead of shipping the Doom games' icons and
desktop files in the g-d-p-produced packages.

I'm happy to include declarative information about the packaged games,
such as a dummy executable or symlink to a real executable suitable for
use with .desktop files' TryExec feature (see quake, quake2, quake3), if
that makes the frontend's job easier - but, again, we can't rely on
being able to update it, so minimal complexity is better.

I would suggest using a nicer programming language than shell. g-d-p has
fewer sharp edges now that it's written in Python 3, and one day I plan
to bolt on a PyGI-based Gtk GUI.

    S