[pkg-fgfs-crew] Bug#714260: Helping with flightgear package

[Markus Wanner]

On 08/11/2013 05:31 PM, Scott Howard wrote:
> I'll be happy to upload, just let me know when everything is ready
> (flightgear, simgear, libraries, etc.)
> I cannot test the package myself, my hardware isn't good enough - but
> I can make sure it is debian policy compliant and rely on your own
> testing.

Cool. I don't quite consider the packages ready, though.

I'm most worried about the data packages, as upstream recently pointed
to difficulties with separating the data. For now, I simply made
flightgear depend on all data packages. Mostly because uptream wants to
avoid noise in bug reports due to missing data. Very understandable,
IMO. (Like for example #610276, #709917).

Unlink Chris states in #618890 [1], somebody upstream told me on IRC,
that you you don't need to remove the models to run with terrasync. He
rather claimed the opposite: terrasync doesn't provide *all* the models
required. So you still need the models provided by the base data
tarball. (Maybe this changed since 2.0. I could certainly use terrasync
alongside an installed base data package with 2.12. I didn't verify the
claim of terrasync not providing all models, yet).

In the long term, I'd like to find a minimal set of data files that
allows flightgear to run. But that seems to require a bit more effort.

Currently, I'm more inclined to require all data packages, as that's the
only mode of operation supported upstream. I'm definitely not willing to
spend time on handling bugs of the "missing required data package" kind.

That in turn almost asks for merging all data back into a single
package. If there weren't reports of difficulties downloading (see
#534839). Is there an official upper size limit?

Alternatively, we could assemble an installer, which allows you to
download base data independent of dpkg. Getting that right is quite an
effort as well, though.

Also note that 2.12 is due on Aug 17th. I think we should focus on that
one. Especially because the upload and the resulting packages are pretty
big. (723M for base data orig.tar.bz2 in 2.10, this grew to 925M for
2.12 as of now). Let's not clutter the archives with a soon obsolete 2.10.

Second note regarding sponsoring: due to renaming, several packages will
go through NEW.	

I'd appreciate comments, especially regarding the dependency and size
issues of the data packages.

Regards

Markus Wanner


[1]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=618890#10