Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
[Putting Debian Blends list in CC to enable wider discussion about DebTags] On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:01:54AM +0100, Markus Koschany wrote: Cool. Did you ever checked whether these games are properly mentioned, classified and thus advertised to the public at the web sentinel of Debian Games[1]? I know of Debian Blends, debtags and the attempt to create a Debian Games Live CD but i haven't added new information to the page yet but it's something which i find interesting to work on. More about possible reasons why it is neglected soon. Indeed two of my big goals are: 1. Creating a Live CD for games similar to the one from linux-gamers.net but using Debian instead of Arch Linux [1]. (A Blend) Properly designed metapackages could perfectly simplify the creation of life CDs (using live-helper). 2. A Debian Games Portal which pools all information about Debian games, screenshots, game descriptions (from the wiki) I'm sorry to interupt you - but why do you want descriptions from the Wiki??? Didn't you write later that you want to have information in one single place? We do have descriptions (and in several cases their translations - number of these is constantly increasing) in the package pool and you consider the Wiki for this purpose. Please consider our experience from the past: At first we had descriptions of what we are packaging in Debian Med on the static HTML pages at www.d.o. When realising that it becomes unmaintainable we started with Wiki entries but despite the fame of Wikis to be up to date all the time we realised that a) they are not and b) it requires way more work than expected. As a consequence we invented the autogenerated tasks pages in the web sentinel that IMHO perfectly qualify like the Debian Games Portal you want to produce - at least if properly maintained. So far about the main intention when implementing the web sentinel: It should serve as a portal for each Blend enabling them to profit from the very same technique. and debtag information. Regarding DebTags see below. Combine that with the looks of a professional gaming clan homepage, add a forum, mumble and social networking and you get the big picture. Well, there is some work to do before... :-) I somehow have the feeling that you try to reach out in the direction of NeuroDebian[2]. The people behind NeuroDebian are closely working together with us and we are seeking for ways to create their web portal based upon the information we are creating in the Blends framework (and in turn enabling other Blends to profit from this work). I intent to issue a GSoC project description about this at least at the end of this weak. (If you are interested to influence this text you are well advised to have a look at the debian-blends mailing list where I will propose it for discussion first.) In general you are planing quite a big shot. IMHO it is a *very* good idea to start with something existing first - for instance if you have some ideas to tweak CSS or the template of the websentinel tasks pages - this would come quite cheap. Adding other things later seems more promising rather than doing everything from scratch (while refusing something you can get for free). The last changes on the games tasks files were done by me (even if I'm not involved in Debian Games and thus perfectly incompetent in categorising games) at 2011-11-27[2]. It would be really great if somebody in the Debian Games team would consider having a look at this effort which is really brain dead simple (just add a line Depends: binary_package to a file and be done - longer doc is available as well[3]) I must admit i have to read the docs first but here are my thoughts: The Games Team is maintaining 331 source packages at the moment. I would prefer that contributors only need to enter information once but can use them multiple times. Would it be possible to create such pages out of debtag information and simply parse the information? If we want to create a metapackage which consists only of arcade games or if we want to update a task, couldn't we just make use of the information presented by debtags? First question: Are you pretty sure that those 331+x binary packages are consistently and properly tagged? (I wrote 331+x binary packages because there are more binary than source packages and DebTags as well as tasks files are related to *binary* packages.) Regarding the relation between DebTags and tasks: I'd really like to merge both way closer and my first attemt to bring both approaches to categorise binary packages together was to list DebTags on the tasks pages for each package and explicitely invite visitors of the pages to go debtaging. I'd regard this as one option to get at least a very basic tool to syncronise. Looking at the current tasks pages[3] the binary packages mentioned there seem to be properly tagged but this is IMHO just for historic reasons:
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
Hi Andreas, others. (dropping the games list and bug since this doesn't really concern them). On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 5:10 AM, Andreas Tille ti...@debian.org wrote: The same is perfectly valid for Debian Multimedia: Last change was done at 2011-07-27 (by fsateler)[4] and those both teams are missing a really big chance to get new users / developers by failing to drive by the Debian Wheezy release notes which is regarded by a large user base all over the world. IMHO it is your choice to tell the world: Hey, there are people inside Debian who care about Games / Multimedia and we have all this cool stuff for you. Debian wants to be one of the big distributions in this field. or you can keep on doing your admitedly fine technical work in your teams which are really studious but shyly hidden inside the large package pool of Debian with 30k packages. Indeed. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to properly leverage the blends tools. I wonder how can we find people willing to help out on this? I've been thinking of asking in the upstream user lists for people that might be interested in helping out defining usable metapackages, but I haven't done it yet. Any other ideas? -- Saludos, Felipe Sateler -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-multimedia-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAAfdZj-3V+G_2A01prxdJ6T_-vM_HytV3_=4JY7fUjt=euj...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
Hi, On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:16:01AM -0300, Felipe Sateler wrote: Hi Andreas, others. (dropping the games list and bug since this doesn't really concern them). On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 5:10 AM, Andreas Tille ti...@debian.org wrote: The same is perfectly valid for Debian Multimedia: Last change was done at 2011-07-27 (by fsateler)[4] and those both teams are missing a really big chance to get new users / developers by failing to drive by the Debian Wheezy release notes which is regarded by a large user base all over the world. IMHO it is your choice to tell the world: Hey, there are people inside Debian who care about Games / Multimedia and we have all this cool stuff for you. Debian wants to be one of the big distributions in this field. or you can keep on doing your admitedly fine technical work in your teams which are really studious but shyly hidden inside the large package pool of Debian with 30k packages. Indeed. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to properly leverage the blends tools. I wonder how can we find people willing to help out on this? I've been thinking of asking in the upstream user lists for people that might be interested in helping out defining usable metapackages, but I haven't done it yet. Any other ideas? Well, I can only tell from my experience: It is not promising just to talk about the things that should be done. You rather need to do things yourself and make it popular. You will make mistakes or forget things and people will give hints how to fix this. You should try to approach to get something out that makes some sense for the moment. If I were you I would definitely go together with Rosea Grammostola who has created his own metapackge layout at https://github.com/johnsen/meta-blends which is even rendered at my test-server: http://blends.debian.net/meta-blends/tasks/ So there *is* somebody who does reasonable work and I'd regard this more reasonable than http://blends.debian.net/multimedia/tasks/ which is more or less my poor work according to SVN - sometimes due to some hints from here. And I would try really hard to verify if it might make sense to start from scratch with a 1:1 copy of Rosea's work. The rationale behind this advise is that you need to start with something that is actually *used* in practise rather than some academic example created by some poor outsider (as I consider myself). As you can see the Blends tools can even work on foreign Git repositories and you might negotiate with Rosea whether he might like to lead / join / guide this effort. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-multimedia-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130320151421.gb17...@an3as.eu
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:14 PM, Andreas Tille ti...@debian.org wrote: On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 5:10 AM, Andreas Tille ti...@debian.org wrote: The same is perfectly valid for Debian Multimedia: Last change was done at 2011-07-27 (by fsateler)[4] and those both teams are missing a really big chance to get new users / developers by failing to drive by the Debian Wheezy release notes which is regarded by a large user base all over the world. IMHO it is your choice to tell the world: Hey, there are people inside Debian who care about Games / Multimedia and we have all this cool stuff for you. Debian wants to be one of the big distributions in this field. or you can keep on doing your admitedly fine technical work in your teams which are really studious but shyly hidden inside the large package pool of Debian with 30k packages. Indeed. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to properly leverage the blends tools. I wonder how can we find people willing to help out on this? I've been thinking of asking in the upstream user lists for people that might be interested in helping out defining usable metapackages, but I haven't done it yet. Any other ideas? Well, I can only tell from my experience: It is not promising just to talk about the things that should be done. You rather need to do things yourself and make it popular. You will make mistakes or forget things and people will give hints how to fix this. You should try to approach to get something out that makes some sense for the moment. If I were you I would definitely go together with Rosea Grammostola who has created his own metapackge layout at https://github.com/johnsen/meta-blends which is even rendered at my test-server: http://blends.debian.net/meta-blends/tasks/ So there *is* somebody who does reasonable work and I'd regard this more reasonable than http://blends.debian.net/multimedia/tasks/ which is more or less my poor work according to SVN - sometimes due to some hints from here. And I would try really hard to verify if it might make sense to start from scratch with a 1:1 copy of Rosea's work. The rationale behind this advise is that you need to start with something that is actually *used* in practise rather than some academic example created by some poor outsider (as I consider myself). As you can see the Blends tools can even work on foreign Git repositories and you might negotiate with Rosea whether he might like to lead / join / guide this effort. Indeed, there are several useful tasks. Some are not within the domain of the pkg-multimedia team, though (the desktop or fluxbox tasks, for example). Rosea, would you like to bring the multimedia-related tasks into debian? We can bring them into the pkg-multimedia git area. Here are some comments as to the tasks that we could bring back: Openstudiopro-admin: Outside pkg-multimedia domain (OD) Openstudiopro-ambisonics: Within doman (WD), but possibly could be merged into other tasks Openstudiopro-composing: WD Openstudiopro-desktop: OD Openstudiopro-devel: OD Openstudiopro-djing: WD Openstudiopro-beat: WD Openstudiopro-firewire: WD Fluxbox: OD Openstudiopro-graphics: Not quite sure, but possibly WD Openstudiopro-guitar: WD Openstudiopro-jack: WD Openstudio-ladi: WD, possibly should be merged with -jack Openstudiopro-looping: WD Openstudiopro-midi: WD Openstudiopro-mixing: WD Openstudiopro-multimedia: WD, could possibly use a better name Openstudiopro-muse2build: OD Openstudiopro-musician: WD Openstudiopro-muscicnotation: WD Openstudiopro-plugins-dssi: WD Openstudiopro-plugins-fst: WD Openstudiopro-plugins-ladspa: WD Openstudiopro-plugins-lv2: WD, all these plugins-* tasks could be merged? Openstudiopro-realtime: Not quite sure, AFAIK a realtime kernel is not needed these days Openstudiopro-recording: WD Openstudiopro-samplers: WD Openstudiopro-soundsynthesis: WD Openstudiopro-synths: WD, could be merged with soundsynthesis Openstudiopro-timestretching: WD, could be merged into plugins? Openstudiopro-trackers: WD Openstudiopro-video: WD -- Saludos, Felipe Sateler -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-multimedia-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAAfdZj9KT0Z1TDcLo0BcTj+U63f4+SU78b=c7x9a-knaemw...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
On 20.03.2013 11:45, Andreas Tille wrote: [...] Indeed two of my big goals are: 1. Creating a Live CD for games similar to the one from linux-gamers.net but using Debian instead of Arch Linux [1]. (A Blend) Properly designed metapackages could perfectly simplify the creation of life CDs (using live-helper). 2. A Debian Games Portal which pools all information about Debian games, screenshots, game descriptions (from the wiki) I'm sorry to interupt you - but why do you want descriptions from the Wiki??? Didn't you write later that you want to have information in one single place? We do have descriptions (and in several cases their translations - number of these is constantly increasing) in the package pool and you consider the Wiki for this purpose. Please consider our experience from the past: I have mentioned these goals because i think Blend tools can help to achieve them. The reason why i also want to make use of Debian's wiki is simple. I think it is more efficient to use existing infrastructure which can easily harness the power of thousands of contributors who provide _additional_ information to a game or application. I think using existing package descriptions is an excellent idea, all the other things i mentioned are completely optional and can be added later step by step. [...] I somehow have the feeling that you try to reach out in the direction of NeuroDebian[2]. I will take a look. Thanks. The people behind NeuroDebian are closely working together with us and we are seeking for ways to create their web portal based upon the information we are creating in the Blends framework (and in turn enabling other Blends to profit from this work). I intent to issue a GSoC project description about this at least at the end of this weak. (If you are interested to influence this text you are well advised to have a look at the debian-blends mailing list where I will propose it for discussion first.) I will subscribe to debian-blends. [...] The Games Team is maintaining 331 source packages at the moment. I would prefer that contributors only need to enter information once but can use them multiple times. Would it be possible to create such pages out of debtag information and simply parse the information? If we want to create a metapackage which consists only of arcade games or if we want to update a task, couldn't we just make use of the information presented by debtags? First question: Are you pretty sure that those 331+x binary packages are consistently and properly tagged? (I wrote 331+x binary packages because there are more binary than source packages and DebTags as well as tasks files are related to *binary* packages.) No, i'm not sure. The only reason why i have mentioned debtags was because i cannot really assess their relevance for Blends. I really want to avoid double work. Perhaps it might make more sense to add debtag information first and then create tasks from them automatically. On the other hand it might be easier to skip this step and to complete your tasks to get the job done. [...] In my experience most Debian users don't even know about debtags +1 and i struggle myself to find the right access to the topic. Most of the time as a user you don't need them, they are somehow opaque. Yes. But you decided to prefer DebTags over tasks to work on your goal anyway. Why? I have no preferences so far and i'm undecided. Hence i'm curious to know what others on the list think about it. As I said above I'm quite in favour of using DebTags in the Blends scope but did not found a way how to do this. There are also other persons who perfer DabTags - but from this mental preference we will not get some product out. We need rather to work on it, right? [...] Skipping your six points here. You are making good points. For the sake of brevity: I agree with you that actually working on something is better than to talk the matter over and over again and reaching no consensus. Just give me more time to evaluate your proposals for myself. [...] I completely agree here. Promotion and new member recruitment are missing out somehow. I think your Mentoring of the Month project is admirable and all teams should do it. Even better Debian should start streamlining this process, Well, Debian is a Do-O-Cracy. So I'm doing it but you have no lever to force other people to follow this example and to streamline this. Yes, I agree it is worth copying but you can not say Debian should adopt this for their teams. Debian is a Do-O-Cracy together with we are all volunteers goes without saying. Unfortunately these buzz words are used too often when it would be more appropriate to say: Decision making is sluggish and we cannot reach a consensus. I think it's worth discussing this and to put more emphasis on team maintenance. I even think it would be great to write it down in Debian's policy. should encourage team maintained
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
Hi Markus, On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 06:14:06PM +0100, Markus Koschany wrote: I have mentioned these goals because i think Blend tools can help to achieve them. The reason why i also want to make use of Debian's wiki is simple. I think it is more efficient to use existing infrastructure which can easily harness the power of thousands of contributors who provide _additional_ information to a game or application. I think using existing package descriptions is an excellent idea, all the other things i mentioned are completely optional and can be added later step by step. Ahh, so I misinterpreted your attempt - I assumed you wanted to keep copied of package descriptions there. You are perfectly right - using existing infrastructure at debian.org is very reasonable. Yes. But you decided to prefer DebTags over tasks to work on your goal anyway. Why? I have no preferences so far and i'm undecided. Hence i'm curious to know what others on the list think about it. Me too. force other people to follow this example and to streamline this. Yes, I agree it is worth copying but you can not say Debian should adopt this for their teams. Debian is a Do-O-Cracy together with we are all volunteers goes without saying. Unfortunately these buzz words are used too often when it would be more appropriate to say: Decision making is sluggish and we cannot reach a consensus. I think it's worth discussing this and to put more emphasis on team maintenance. I even think it would be great to write it down in Debian's policy. You do seem to assume that there is any interest in discussing. My experience is different - so far there was no discussion and no need to find some consensus because there was no controverse discussion. The Games Team has good documentation and i found it easy to follow it. Unfortunately other teams have done the same or they have different requirements. Hence my proposal to streamline this for all teams, because every team is part of Debian, isn't it? Your intention is brave and I would wish you good luck in proposing this. I think leading by example is the best approach. The other one is to reach a consensus and to anchor it in Debian's policy. As I said: If there is no controversal discussion trying to reach a consensus is void. I will read through the Blends documentation during the next days and give you more feedback about it. Would also like to see some improvements on this matter. This would be really great. Kind regards and thanks for your comments Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-multimedia-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130320212651.ga32...@an3as.eu
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 01:29:49PM -0300, Felipe Sateler wrote: As you can see the Blends tools can even work on foreign Git repositories and you might negotiate with Rosea whether he might like to lead / join / guide this effort. Indeed, there are several useful tasks. Some are not within the domain of the pkg-multimedia team, though (the desktop or fluxbox tasks, for example). This is actually no problem. A Blend is not a collection of packages maintained by team members. A Blend is rather a collection of packages useful for a certain task and the Blends team picks the needed things from the package pool - whoever might maintain the single packages. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-multimedia-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130320213317.gb32...@an3as.eu
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Andreas Tille ti...@debian.org wrote: On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 01:29:49PM -0300, Felipe Sateler wrote: As you can see the Blends tools can even work on foreign Git repositories and you might negotiate with Rosea whether he might like to lead / join / guide this effort. Indeed, there are several useful tasks. Some are not within the domain of the pkg-multimedia team, though (the desktop or fluxbox tasks, for example). This is actually no problem. A Blend is not a collection of packages maintained by team members. A Blend is rather a collection of packages useful for a certain task and the Blends team picks the needed things from the package pool - whoever might maintain the single packages. I understand. However, I meant that some tasks don't have much to do with multimedia, and thus don't really fit within the Multimedia Blend scope. -- Saludos, Felipe Sateler -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-multimedia-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAAfdZj-smmPm7+FUZ4qHbbiC7SiGamX_5z=q_hsgvue+qc1...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Please consider maintaining Blends information (Was: Bullet Physics Library)
On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 07:11:52PM -0300, Felipe Sateler wrote: This is actually no problem. A Blend is not a collection of packages maintained by team members. A Blend is rather a collection of packages useful for a certain task and the Blends team picks the needed things from the package pool - whoever might maintain the single packages. I understand. However, I meant that some tasks don't have much to do with multimedia, and thus don't really fit within the Multimedia Blend scope. You might like to have a look onto the tasks of Debian Edu for some inspiration what others might consider reasonable: http://blends.alioth.debian.org/edu/tasks/ In Debian Med we did not specified those rather general desktop tasks but there is actually no reason to restrict yourself onto pure multimedia tasks if you want to create a full users system. Just for letting you know what others are doing. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-multimedia-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130320223941.gd32...@an3as.eu
