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 at Salsa 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/tool 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.
Contents
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.
Scout for games and file an appropriate wnpp bug if they're not already submitted. Also, don't forget to add the usertag of the games team (see instructions) and 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.
Upload screenshots for games that lack them to http://screenshots.debian.net/
Triage our bug reports, find fixes in other distros, forward bugs upstream and so on
Organise games work parties
Organise our meetings
- Report spam in the list archives
Triage the debtags on our packages
- Manually test all games and file bugs about issues found
Work on promotion of the games team and new member recruitment
Packaging
Guidelines about contributing to a Games Team package for the first time: Games/Guidelines
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.
Look at packages from other distros for new games and to see if they have any supplemental patches. Use whohas for existing games.
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 details of Jon's master plan for doom packages, see Games/Doom
For guidelines on packaging Love2d games, see Games/Love2d
For packaging Godot games, see Games/Godot
In Games/-data is a draft about data packages.
Work to make a Games/Live image is in progress.
Internal pages
- Internal projects:
Games/GameDataPackager - a tool for building .deb files for non-debian-distributable game data
- Debates
- Resources
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 games-team.
?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.