The purpose of the Debian Games Team is to coordinate, share common problems and solutions and even in some cases be able to maintain games collaboratively. There is a project in Alioth and the irc channel #debian-games on irc.debian.org created for that purpose.
The coordination of this project happens on the debian-devel-games mailing list. There are also two additional lists: pkg-games-devel (subscribe), which is used for bug reports, and pkg-games-commits (subscribe) to track changes made to the subversion and git repositories.
The main goals of the project are:
- Maintaining games collaboratively, as they tend to share many points in common.
- "Scale economy" benefits: maintaining more packages, quicker and with less effort.
- Open a way towards a larger involvement in Debian project to people maintaining just one or few games.
- Quick-fixing of security issues common to games.
- Discussion of problems and facts relative to game packaging.
- Discussion of how the DFSG might be interpreted regarding multimedia contents and artwork in games.
- Identify important games that are not packaged yet and package them.
- Identify games that we were only maintaining out of inertia, and consider dropping them.
- Make it easier for users to know the games available in Debian, maybe with some game selector interface, a web page, screenshots or whatever.
- Collaborative maintenance of common infrastructure libs, like SDL.
- Collaborative initial packaging of huge new games, like GPLed Nexuiz first-person shooter.
- Handling licensing problems relative to games. Maybe even replacing non-free bits with DFSG-free content.
Get Involved
Everybody
Non-packaging work
Design a logo and/or a website for the project or merge the two proposed logos.
- Create/replace non-free media contents with free contents in non-free packages or for games not yet in Debian. (There was a thread related to a big collection of those media, somebody please link to it.)
Scout for games and file an appropriate wnpp bug if they're not already submitted. Also, don't forget to include it under Games/Suggested.
Go through game related WNPP bugs evaluating RFPs and ITPs.
- Help with the documentation of all games.
- Maintain the wiki pages.
- Help with translations for the game documentation and/or the wiki pages.
Create and maintain the webpage. http://pkg-games.alioth.debian.org/
Packaging
Evaluate and eventually package one of the Games/Suggested.
Fix open bugs which are present in Debian Games Team's packages.
Fix lintian warnings and errors which are present in Debian Games Team's packages.
Help with utnubu-tization and backport changes into sid. (Dead link)
Fix issues seen by our Games/Autobuilder.
- look at packages from other distros and see if they have any supplemental patches
SuSE packages here
Develop a Games/Policy applying to all games, to ensure QA, and enforce it, e.g. using lintian checks.
Debian Developers
Sponsor non-Debian developers who have placed upload requests. Please visit Games/Sponsors for further information about the process.
Developer's resources
Games/VCS is a quick reference for working with the pkg-games git and SVN repositores.
In Games/Suggested we maintain a list of games that seem suitable for packaging.
In Games/Unsuitable we list games that we cannot package for Debian main currently.
In Games/WNPP we maintain a list of orphaned, soon-to-be-packaged or requested games.
For instructions on building udeb packages (for the installer), see BuildingUDebs.
For details of Jon's master plan for doom packages, see Games/Doom
For commit activity and more details CIA is watching us.
In Games/-data is a draft about data packages.
Internal pages
- Internal projects:
Doom packaging policy (also the development verion is avilable)
- Debates
Game Packages
For a user-centric page about games in Debian, see Game.
Most of our game packages should be in the git repositories or in the svn repositories. There's a chance that some might not be in any yet. The list below is certainly outdated. The DFSG free games are located under packages/trunk.
Games/Oolite (dual licensed GPL/by-nc-sa 2.0)
Links
In Games/Links you can find links to web pages and blogs that can be useful in following the state of the art in Linux Games and in Free Games in general.