1 |
On Saturday, August 22, 2015, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote: |
2 |
> |
3 |
> |
4 |
> Games differ in a lot of ways and they _require_ different policies. In |
5 |
> some cases this also means more lax policies and in some cases more |
6 |
> strict policies. |
7 |
> |
8 |
> An example is unbundling libraries. While unbundling libraries is often |
9 |
> a good idea for regular well-maintained projects, it can often cause |
10 |
> various problems for games: |
11 |
> * games upstreams often modify 3rd party libraries |
12 |
> * games upstreams often use libraries in very fishy ways, so you really |
13 |
> need a very specific version |
14 |
> * for proprietary games breakage often happens randomly at runtime |
15 |
> * proprietary games may also break silently when library XY is bumped in |
16 |
> the tree |
17 |
|
18 |
|
19 |
While I get what you're saying, none of the specific issues you listed |
20 |
are actually unique to games, especially FOSS games. These sorts of |
21 |
issues tend to happen with lots of desktop/multimedia-oriented |
22 |
applications. I do agree that they hit games pretty hard though and |
23 |
games maintainers should have a forum for discussing them. |
24 |
|
25 |
Where I think games tend to exacerbate this issue is that they're |
26 |
often proprietary and non-free which makes detecting these issues |
27 |
harder, and fixing them almost impossible for the library maintainers. |
28 |
Also, they tend to not have equal FOSS substitutes. A proprietary |
29 |
word processor will tend to not have much interest in Gentoo because |
30 |
there are so many decent FOSS alternatives. Since games tend to be |
31 |
more about the content then the engines, they tend to be expensive to |
32 |
write FOSS replacements for, so people tend to use the proprietary |
33 |
ones. |
34 |
|
35 |
And that is why I think we have to be careful about just taking any |
36 |
games issue and leaving it up to the games team. I think they can |
37 |
take the lead on raising these issues, and when nobody else has a |
38 |
solution to their problems they should certainly have a bias for |
39 |
action in solving them on their own. However, when a problem does |
40 |
have competing solutions across the tree or where there is value in |
41 |
consistency we shouldn't just leave it up to the games team to do |
42 |
whatever they want with the games. Do we really want a world where |
43 |
multimedia applications go in /usr/multimedia/bin, toolchain goes in |
44 |
/usr/toolchain/bin, science goes in /usr/science/bin, and so on? All |
45 |
of those have projects, and all of them have unique concerns. That |
46 |
doesn't make all of their concerns unique. |
47 |
|
48 |
-- |
49 |
Rich |