On Saturday, August 22, 2015, hasufell <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Games differ in a lot of ways and they _require_ different policies. In > some cases this also means more lax policies and in some cases more > strict policies. > > An example is unbundling libraries. While unbundling libraries is often > a good idea for regular well-maintained projects, it can often cause > various problems for games: > * games upstreams often modify 3rd party libraries > * games upstreams often use libraries in very fishy ways, so you really > need a very specific version > * for proprietary games breakage often happens randomly at runtime > * proprietary games may also break silently when library XY is bumped in > the tree
While I get what you're saying, none of the specific issues you listed are actually unique to games, especially FOSS games. These sorts of issues tend to happen with lots of desktop/multimedia-oriented applications. I do agree that they hit games pretty hard though and games maintainers should have a forum for discussing them. Where I think games tend to exacerbate this issue is that they're often proprietary and non-free which makes detecting these issues harder, and fixing them almost impossible for the library maintainers. Also, they tend to not have equal FOSS substitutes. A proprietary word processor will tend to not have much interest in Gentoo because there are so many decent FOSS alternatives. Since games tend to be more about the content then the engines, they tend to be expensive to write FOSS replacements for, so people tend to use the proprietary ones. And that is why I think we have to be careful about just taking any games issue and leaving it up to the games team. I think they can take the lead on raising these issues, and when nobody else has a solution to their problems they should certainly have a bias for action in solving them on their own. However, when a problem does have competing solutions across the tree or where there is value in consistency we shouldn't just leave it up to the games team to do whatever they want with the games. Do we really want a world where multimedia applications go in /usr/multimedia/bin, toolchain goes in /usr/toolchain/bin, science goes in /usr/science/bin, and so on? All of those have projects, and all of them have unique concerns. That doesn't make all of their concerns unique. -- Rich
