Bug#856728: opentyrian: When run via menu the game silently exits if data is missing

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 04 Mar 2017 at 20:29:05 +0100, Alexandre Detiste wrote:
> I had a patch for this that was proposed upstream,
> then I completely forgot about it:
> 
> https://bitbucket.org/opentyrian/opentyrian/pull-requests/6/display-dialog-box-if-files-are-missing/diff
> 
> This could be reworked & simplified for Debian only.

Freeze exception requested,
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=856810

On Sat, 04 Mar 2017 at 22:00:09 +0100, Andrej Mernik wrote:
> I was actually thinking more  that the post installer would run game-data-
> packager if the user clicks yes.

Sorry, that isn't possible for several reasons. game-data-packager is
currently a CLI rather than interactive, and needs to be told where to
find data as command-line arguments. If it was interactive (we want
it to be a GUI eventually), then it would still be unsuitable to run
from packages' maintainer scripts because GUIs should never run as root,
because package installation while offline should work, and because
maintainer scripts run with the dpkg lock held (so additional package
installations are impossible).

The long-term solution is likely to be putting a "launcher" wrapper
in opentyrian's menu entry, which would run the real engine if everything
is available, or launch the hypothetical future game-data-packager GUI
if data files are missing. Several games (e.g. quake) already have a
wrapper like this, although so far it just shows an error message,
because turning game-data-packager into an interactive GUI is going to be
a lot of work.

    S