Bug#884354: game-data-packager: [doom] default behaviour of downloading and packaging e1m{4, 8}b is wrong

[Simon McVittie]

On Fri, 15 Dec 2017 at 11:22:13 +0000, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 06:19:21PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > The semi-official Quake Episode 5: Dimensions of the Past (by id Software
> > licensee MachineGames) should perhaps get activated_by as well.
> 
> Noted. Interestingly I didn't hit this problem when packaging up my
> quake1 data.

I wonder why not? Perhaps downloading was skipped because you didn't
have unar and so wouldn't have been able to unpack the rar archive?
(I didn't think g-d-p was that intelligent about archives, though.)

> I did get the pleasant surprise of having it patched up
> from 1.01 to 1.06 and that process "just work"ing, which was lovely.

This is one of my big goals for g-d-p: everyone should get the best
possible version of their game, given what's available/downloadable.
(For instance, for Unreal Tournament that means all the official Bonus
Packs, the last official patch, the community patch that followed,
disabling a feature that has unfixed security flaws, and enabling the
expanded single-player ladder from the Game of the Year edition.)

> > One thing I've considered doing for g-d-p in future is having "install
> > for only me" support, which harvests the right files (that's 90% of g-d-p
> > these days), but drops them into ~/.q3a or equivalent instead of actually
> > packaging them (the remaining 10%); or using Flatpak, which can install
> > either system-wide or locally.
> 
> Yes those are both good ideas. Do we no longer have any
> hard-dependencies on data packages from game engine packages? I recall
> at some point in the past the Fedora Games people looking at g-d-p and
> an RPM back end.

When I uploaded iortcw and openjk they did have hard dependencies, but
the ftp team queried that, and after some discussion we agreed that in
future the games should depend on foo-data | game-data-packager to make
sure they're always installable (and should do a pre-flight check and
pop up a warning if their actual engines don't cope well with missing
data). game-data-packager-runtime provides common logic for the pre-flight
check and other "launcher" bits.

I say "the games" rather than "game engines" because I am of the opinion
that in cases where one engine can play multiple games (darkplaces,
ioquake3, scummvm) or one game can be played by multiple engines (Quake,
Doom) we should distinguish between the engine and the game in how they're
packaged: the engine is only of interest to enthusiasts and developers,
and the game is the user-facing "product" with a menu entry.

Alexandre wrote RPM and Arch Linux support for g-d-p: RPM should work
well, but Arch Linux packages are only at proof-of-concept level, AIUI.

    smcv