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Debian Games Team is looking for new members

PostPosted: 13 Sep 2013, 17:05
by Julius
The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team provides packaging and support of games in Debian and Ubuntu archives. From RPGs, FPS's and RTS's to flight sims, board games and art games, we work collaboratively to share problems, bugfix, package and promote FOSS games in all genres and we seek new members to assist us in our work. We have roles for all technical levels. From producing screenshots and documentation, building packages of existing games, tracking down new and interesting games for inclusion to helping with licensing and source materials of games and art. If you have a passion for GNU/Linux, love gaming and want to help make the base distro of Ubuntu, Mint and many others even better then please contact us on IRC #debian-games on irc.oftc.net or via our mailing list at debian-devel-games@lists.debian.org .


As the upsteam source of many popular distributions (Ubuntu, Mint etc.) this is quite an influential team when it comes to open-source games ;)
Although it seems other, less distribution and platform dependent, means of managing your games (e.g. Desurium and the like) seem to have partially replaced the Linux repositories, especially since those tend to be really out of date, thus not that useful for dynamic and regularly updated multiplayer games.

Re: Debian Games Team is looking for new members

PostPosted: 13 Sep 2013, 21:24
by devnewton
What can game developpers do to help?

I manage to generate deb package, it's a lot of work and I not sure it is even usefull for real debian packaging :-(

http://devnewton.bci.im/projects/newton ... rPackagers

Re: Debian Games Team is looking for new members

PostPosted: 14 Sep 2013, 00:16
by jcantero
devnewton {l Wrote}:I manage to generate deb package, it's a lot of work and I not sure it is even usefull for real debian packaging :-(

Sure it's useful. It guarantees your game is easily packaged, if not anything else.

IMHO packaging is not a job for the developers, it's a insane amount of work that's tricky if you are not aware of the details of every particular distro. But, on the other hand, it's important to keep fluid comunications between upstream and software packagers: it's the best interest for both parts.

Futhermore, Debian Games Team share the goal of promoting FOSS gaming, so I think it's interesting to the FGD community as a whole to establish some sort of contact with them (It is only my personal opinion, of course).

Re: Debian Games Team is looking for new members

PostPosted: 16 Sep 2013, 11:41
by mongrol
Hi all,
I'm the original poster of the press release on reddit (hopefully making its way onto some other sites too). The team is very interested in working with developers and there's plenty you can do to be a "good upstream" :) . I believe generally we like to maintain our own package of your software as you've mentioned, it's easy to roll a .deb, but hard to make one good enough to pass QA and get into the archive. However, making a .deb is still a good idea as it helps to constrain your build system to something compatible with the archive. I've only recently started packaging myself and have had to deal with all sorts of issues with quirky build systems already. It also gives us something to pick up and run with meaning faster packaging and better chance of making it in.

More important than packaging though is generally being a good upstream. We do frequently encounter build issues while packaging and more often than not we need to patch the build to make it work. Ideally these patches would be pushed upstream and handled there so by accepting these patches into your build makes everything run smoother.

I'm happy to keep this thread going and answer questions. It's also been pointed out to the team so others may pipe in here as well.

Re: Debian Games Team is looking for new members

PostPosted: 16 Sep 2013, 13:59
by devnewton
Hello mongrol,

The main problem I have when it comes to debian packaging is how to do it with maven. I use jdeb maven plugin, but I think it wont work for building source package. There is a mh_make script, but I dont understand how to use it and it is made only for the old maven 2.

A lot of new games use the same technologies: java + maven + lwjgl based engine (custom, libgdx, slick2d or jmonkey). Providing a tutorial to explain what game developpers must do to provides to make their project "debian packaging ready" would be great!

Re: Debian Games Team is looking for new members

PostPosted: 18 Sep 2013, 11:06
by mongrol
I don't know anything about java packaging myself but I'll bring it to the attention of the team. Hopefully one of us can either pop in here to give guidance and provide something on the list.

On a quick search there does appear to be some wiki articles and help scripts already existing. Have you see these?

https://wiki.debian.org/Java/Packaging
https://wiki.debian.org/Java/MavenDebianHelper

Re: Debian Games Team is looking for new members

PostPosted: 19 Sep 2013, 09:02
by devnewton
Have you see these?


Yes, but the documentation of mh_make talks about maven 2 (deprecated), Subversion (I use fossil scm) and tell nothing about what to do after.

I use jdeb to generate my packages, it comes the kind of documentation a java/maven developper expects: https://github.com/tcurdt/jdeb/blob/mas ... s/maven.md