Translation(s): English - Italiano - Português (Brasil)

This page is about the Debian Games packaging team. For information about Games in Debian, see Games

Debian Games Team

Infrastructure

Website: you're looking at it!
Mailing List: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-games/
Salsa group: https://salsa.debian.org/games-team
Documentation: see the development page and related pages
Unix group: pkg-games
Packages: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-games-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org

Interacting with the team

Read the FAQ first: see the wiki documentation
Email contact: debian-devel-games@lists.debian.org (mailing list)
- Alioth list for bug reports: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-games-devel/
- Alioth list for Salsa commits: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-games-commits/
Public IRC channel: #debian-games on irc.debian.org (OFTC)

Task description

The purpose of the Debian Games Team is to coordinate, share common problems and solutions and to maintain games collaboratively.

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

Debian Games Team
Team Meetings
Goals
Links

Get Involved

If you are new to packaging and want to find out how to get your game into Debian, try the Games/IntoDebian page.

People who want to see some games in Debian should look at Games/Suggested and submit a request for package (RFP) bug report against the wnpp meta package.

Debtags was considered and Enrico Zini is open to new tags addition.

So using debtags, is a way to install cool games without looking at everything in the 'games' category which includes fortunes, bb etc. (which is cool also but maybe inappropriate )

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

Packaging

Guidelines about contributing to a Games Team package for the first time: Teams/Games/Guidelines
QA reports: DDPO DMD
Evaluate and eventually package one of the Teams/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.
- SuSE packages here
- PlayDeb packages here
- Fedora games that are not packaged for Debian yet. here
Develop a Teams/Games/Policy applying to all games, to ensure QA, and enforce it, e.g. using lintian checks.

Developer's resources

In Teams/Games/Suggested we maintain a list of games that seem suitable for packaging.
In Teams/Games/Unsuitable we list games that we cannot package for Debian main currently.
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.

Game Packages

For a user-centric page about games in Debian, see Games.

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.

Team Meetings

Starting early 2011 the games team is trying to have meetings every month or two. If you'd like to join in, visit Games/Meetings and have a look at the next meeting agenda if one is available.

Goals

Players often want to start game servers temporarily; some games have a GUI option but an init.d frontend with parameters to allow non-root start/stop (i.e. not using var...) would be desired.