Antoine Beaupré <anar...@debian.org> writes:
> I wonder if we should just do the same. I'm not sure I see the point of
> having all that stuff in a separate directory, personnally, but at least
> in this case we shouldn't needlessly diverge from upstream... although
> in terms of upstream for bsd-games, things are kind of hazy, at best,
> from what I understand.
I am inclined to agree; it's just one more thing for people to think about
while packaging things, and I don't think it serves much of a useful
purpose. However, the bug log has a couple of concrete objections.
Axel Beckert objected because games may conflict with other tools
installed in /usr/bin. I feel like this is already a bug and merging the
two namespaces to force us to deal with that bug may be a feature in
disguise, because having two binaries with entirely different purposes on
the user's PATH is a recipe for confusion and problems. The two bugs
cited were:
https://bugs.debian.org/845629
https://bugs.debian.org/752114
which are about a conflict between the game pacman and the package manager
pacman. The game pacman now appears to be orphaned but does indeed still
ship /usr/games/pacman, and /usr/bin/pacman is provided by
pacman-package-manager.
There was also one request (from Alexandre Detiste) to retain this
separation that, if I understood it correctly, was based on wanting to
block access to games for children with accounts on the system.
This is similar the old multiuser timeshare use case for separating games
back when they competed for resources with other uses of the system and
administrators wanted to be able to stop people from running them until
after hours. I feel like this use case is exceptionally rare at this
point, and I'm not sure it's worth the packaging thought to maintain a
separation just for that.
Alexandre also requested keeping games data separate so that it could be
moved out of the /usr partition because it could be quite large. This is
another concern that I think in the subsequent eight years has become a
bit less compelling due to the increase in the size of disks (which is
only sort of keeping up with full commercial games, but is certainly
keeping up with the games packaged in Debian).
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
