Re: free game engines, non-distributable game data and how to ship them
* Evgeni Golov <sargentd@die-welt.net> [2008-03-16 23:24:55 CET]:
> while trying to package FreeRA[1] a free (as in speech) Command &
> Conquer: Red Alert (C&C2, 1996) engine and talking with Jon on IRC, I
> stumbled over the problem, how to find the game data (which needs to be
> copied from the original game cd-rom and is non-distributable).
First time I heard of it - but I had similar issues with freecnc[1] and
now wonder: is FreeRA a fork of that? Completely independent? Because
well, freecnc supports RA of course, too ... I see a mentioning of
freecnc in the news of freera, so it seems to be slightly connected.
Anyway, what I was about to say: freecnc worked with the demo data that
is public available from ftp://ftp.westwood.com/pub/cc1/previews/demo/
so I would expect/hope that freera would work with the demo data from
there, too. I thought about producing some download/install script for
fetching those demo data from there, though as time has shown effort
both of my Debian package[3] and the upstream freecnc team has ceased to
exist. :/
> 1. game installs as usual via apt-get (without a dep on a data package)
> and the user gets an error message upon start, he should copy the two
> files to /somepath (which path should it be in that case?)
I would see no problem with having the data in its "proper" directory
under /usr/share/games/freera.
> 2. let the package depend on a non-existing (in the archive)
> freera-data, which has to be built with Jon's game-package
I'm not sure if depending on a non-existing package makes sense because
one wouldn't be able to install the package at all to read its
documentation, and that's where I would expect informations on how to
get it working. Would you think the package description should contain
all of what one would put into a README.Debian or similar?
> The second way is cleaner in the sense of packet management, but makes
> freera at first uninstallable without a reason shown to the user (he
> would have to read the long-desc to know about the data stuff).
How long would such a long-description turn out to for you?
So long,
Rhonda
[2] http://freecnc.org/
[3] http://rhonda.deb.at/debian/freecnc/
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