Mail from the Ubuntu mame MOTU

[Jordi Mallach]

Hey,

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 01:26:25PM +0200, Cesare Falco wrote:
> the source tree in Mess tarball has some directories in common with Mame.
> I don't remember whether overwrites occur (I had to halt the Mess thing for
> a while due to lack of time), btw I chose to make it short and build them in
> turn.  I'll have a closer look when I'm back home.

The common dirs are easy: docs, which we don't care about, and hash, which
is full of files in MESS but only has one in MAME. I took care of that by
symlinking the single MAME file. :)

> don't tell me. :o
> It nearly drove me crazy during this years, and I must admit I probably
> missed something at some point.
> I thought about it a lot, we can take for granted what the Mame/Mess team
> say or we can write some kind of parsing tool. I see no other ways. :(

Parsing with some grep + regexp hack might help us, but we will always
need to have some manual editing I guess. Geez, thinking about this makes
me sick. :)

> Should we chose to make a single mame-tools package, I'd see no need
> for providing mess-tools, as it doesn't really exist yet. ;)
> We could just making mess suggest mame-tools, couldn't we?

Yeah, this is what we have right now. Looking at what MESS provides, I
really see no point in bothering with another package. The tools are
rarely used (people want our packages to spoil countless hours playing old
games, not to convert rare files into even stranger formats.

My vote is to stick the two mess tools in mame: the mess tools say they
are for MESS if you use "foo --help" anyway.

>    + all tools are in a single mame-tools package
>      - pros: probably easier to maintain in the future; no redundancy
>      - cons: the user can't tell which is which anymore

I vote for this one! :)

> great!
> I'm attaching my full debian dir. It's only ~30k bzipped so I hope it won't
> hurt
> anyone. Please note the contrib files. I submitted the man pages upstream,
> but they're not been included in the main tree AFAIK.

OK, I see there area major differences by now in both trees. Cesare, how
do you think we should manage the delta? I'm not sure how ubuntu works,
but the policy is to prefer not have "ubuntu" changes if possible, right?

Would it work for you if the Ubuntu archive synced our package with, if
necessary, the extra bits you need for a transition? For example, I see
you have sdlmame packages for transition that you'd need to keep until a
new Ubuntu release happens, etc.

Also, there's mame-common. Would you mind elaborating what that is for? Is
it to hold those files that both mame and mess can use? (keymaps, etc I
guess?).

> I did something different (see above), but your idea could be better than
> mine.

Yeah, I saw what you did. *shrug*, two different ways. We just need to
pick one. What is currently in git is working right now and it produces a
mess package. However, I have never used mess, so I lack the necessary
data to test it... :P

> We need to check whether file/dir clashing occurs first. ;)

There shouldn't be, as all the mess stuff is in a subdir. In general, I
think the upstream way of dealing with the mess source code is a bit
horrible. I think mess and mame should simply merge into a single project.
:)

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
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