[maemo-developers] [Testingsquad-list] Stratagus game engine

[From: Attila Csipa]

On Saturday 21 August 2010 20:39:54 Ian Stirling wrote:
> I've been ignoring these packages.
> In addition to the above - there are several other packages which won't
> run meaningfully without external data - game engines, with often no
> link or mention of where this other data can be found in the package
> description, or in the UI.

It's probably going to be unpopular, but one way of going about this is to 
make a group out of these packages with a special policy, just as we have them 
for command line apps. Description mentions are IMHO not the best solution as 
it's too easy to skip/miss them and then you're left wondering why this stuff 
doesn't work. My first thought about doing it in the least invasive, but firm 
and informative manner is to use a bootstrapper/launcher - the actual app 
would not be started directly, but instead would depend on a (provisional 
name) external-game-data package (not in a user section) and would be required 
to start that from the .desktop file. It would also drop two files in 
/etc/externalgamedata.d/, a packagename.files and a packagename.info, the first 
containing the paths required, and the second that displays info where these 
can be obtained from. Then, when the end user launches the app, the launcher 
checks if the files are present, if yes, cool, launch game, if not, show info 
dialog which clearly states what goes where. Personally, I would maybe also 
require game data to be in MyDocs (so users could just drop it via USB), 
though this might encounter tech problems (due to VFAT limits). Thoughts ? I 
will gladly make such a launcher in bash if we have a consensus of doing 
things this way. 

Best regards,
Attila