On Sat, 22 Aug 2015 13:10:54 +0200
hasufell <hasufell@gentoo.org> wrote:

Great response, thanks!

> Because of that, I provide a 'bundled-libs' USE flag for almost all
> proprietary games I package (e.g. those from GOG). So in case
> something breaks, the user can still opt-out of all this.

I like unbundling but I also like this compromise. I wrote a wrapper
for launching Minecraft that allows the libraries to be unbundled but
because Minecraft updates are automatically downloaded by the official
launcher, I had to make it resilient to new dependencies suddenly
appearing and I also had to make it easy to disable entirely in the
event of problems. As things stand, it is woefully out of date due to
my other Java duties but I'll get there.

> Data ebuilds with cdinstall and optional gog sources are already
> available, see
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/games-fps/duke3d-data/duke3d-data-1.0-r2.ebuild
> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/games-rpg/arx-fatalis-data/arx-fatalis-data-1.21-r2.ebuild

REQUIRED_USE="^^ ( cdinstall gog )"

That is great use of REQUIRED_USE. Last time I looked at this,
REQUIRED_USE didn't exist so I hadn't seen any examples but this is
exactly what I would have done.

> About data ebuilds... they make sense when at least some of these
> points are true:
> * data is very very big (you don't want extract 8GB just because you
> changed an engine USE flag)
> * upstream provides the engine and the data separately anyway
> * upstream sometimes bumps the data without bumping the engine or
> vice versa
> * we have a lot of data-specific USE flags (you don't want to
> recompile the whole engine just because you are trying different
> music-packs)
> * the data portion uses the cdinstall USE flag (you definitely want to
> decrease the number of times users have to look for their CD...)
> 
> In some cases, we are forced to make data ebuilds anyway, e.g. when
> you have opensource engines for proprietary games.
> 
> But there's no reason to split off -data ebuilds for every possible
> package. It's done if it makes sense and doesn't overcomplicate ebuild
> development and user-side configuration/installation.

I'm pleased to say I was thinking along the same lines. This gives me
confidence that I could contribute games without upsetting anybody, be
it alone or part of a team.

-- 
James Le Cuirot (chewi)
Gentoo Linux Developer