[gmail] Re: status of quake3 and taspring

[Jon Dowland]

On Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 01:22:49PM +0100, Lee Garrett wrote:
> Only bug I found is in the quake3-data pkg: When you
> choose to install the point release and the mirror doesn't
> have that file (ftp.idsoftware.com seems to be missing
> it), it breaks the install as it doesn't let you choose a
> different mirror. dpkg then flakes out and leaves the
> packages unconfigured. Except for that I guess those
> packages are fit for sid!

Hi: I've not been keeping up-to-date on the quake3
developments, but I've been involved in discussions on
data-like packages such as this and best practises for how
they work.

I think that the installation hooks {pre,post}{inst,rm} are
not the right place to do any kind of sophisticated
unpacking of external data, calling out to FTP sites etc.: I
think the java-package model is the only clean way to go,
and modelled doom-package on that.

Have you seen how doom-package works? I can try and knock
out a proof-of-concept implementation for quake3 too.

> I see. So I guess ioquake3 should be among the lines of
> "Depends: quake3-data|openarena-data"?

I'd suggest a virtual package which described the quake3
games files, such as "quake3-pak" or somesuch, which was
Provides:-ed by openarena-data and quake3-data (or the
resulting .deb from running something like doom-package, if
you see what I mean).
 

-- 
Jon Dowland