Bug#1070845: godot (3.6+ds-1) to be uploaded to Debian unstable in a couple of day

[Travis Wrightsman]

The Godot game engine is an unusual case at the moment for a few
reasons:

1) Godot 4.x has dropped support for GLES2 and therefore lots of
   (slightly) older hardware that is still targetable in 3.x.

2) The 4.x engine can't run 3.x games directly. It must do a one-time
   migration on the codebase which is not guaranteed to work.

3) It took a while for 4.x to become a trustable base for developers to
   start new games on. So while 4.x is over a year old, my understanding is
   that the 3.x engine is still used for new games today (particularly for
   reason #1).

4) 3.x is still actively maintained and even receives new and backported
   features from 4.x.

Upstream describes Godot 3.x as "a mature and stable codebase, which is
well suited to development for low-end hardware" [0]. The language they
use heavily implies 3.x is almost a different product from 4.x.

Of course, these reasons may not be convincing enough for the wider
Games Team / Debian project to co-support 3.x and 4.x. I hope many
others can chime in with their thoughts and needs.

At least a few Games Team members have expressed [1,2,3] a desire to
have both versions in Debian for one or more of the reasons above.

We also don't have to maintain 3.x forever. Perhaps Godot 4.x adds GLES2
support or there is no longer a desire for 3.x by the end of trixie and
the package is dropped from testing.

Regarding naming, I have no strong opinion on whether Godot 4.x is named
godot or godot4. Godot 3.x is and will certainly stay godot3.

[0] https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-6-finally-released/
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/2024/12/msg00002.html
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/godot3/-/merge_requests/3#note_558965
[3] Discussions in #debian-games

On Fri, Dec 20, 2024 at 09:54:27AM -0500, Jeremy Bícha wrote:
> It is somewhat unusual for multiple versions of an app to be available
> in a single Debian release. Why do you want to do it in this case?
> 
> If you do think it's necessary, I consider it best practice to package
> the newer version with the unversioned package name. In other words,
> latest godot is godot. And then you would have a godot3 package for
> people needing the older version.
> 
> Thank you,
> Jeremy Bícha