alex4 depends on alex4-data but is NBS

[Chris Peterson]

alex4-data is currently listed as an NBS due to changes in alex4 v1.1-10, which drops alex4-data as as a build target but leaves alex4-data as a potential Depends. I've read through (Debian Bug) #1035043 but it is still unclear to me (1) the intended fate of alex4-data and (2) if it can be fully replaced by game-data-packager.

It appears that alex4-data on Debian is just an old version of alex4 which builds it. My assumption is that the answer to (2) is yes, and game-data-packager is meant to fully replace alex4-data. In this case my suggestion is to drop alex4-data from Depends (patch to follow this post).

I will note that these changes were only from a few days ago, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun.

[Chris Peterson (cpete)]

Here's the patch removing alex4-data as a Depends target. If this is not desired, then we should investigate adding alex4-data to the archive.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "alex4_1.1-10_alex4_1.1-10ubuntu1.debdiff" seems to be a debdiff. The ubuntu-sponsors team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review and hopefully sponsor the debdiff. If the attachment isn't a patch, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are member of the ~ubuntu-sponsors, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issue please contact him.]

[Dan Bungert (dbungert)]

Please forward to Debian then I'm good for upload.

[Chris Peterson (cpete)]

Forwarded as Bug#1057483. You can follow the Debian thread here:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1057483

[Dan Bungert (dbungert)]

Uploaded, thanks!

[Alexandre Detiste (alexandre-detiste)]

this game is in same situation as for example opentyrian
that "Depends: tyrian-data | game-data-packager (>= 40)"
for ten years ...

I follow this one patterns, other _contrib_ game
maintainer only "Recommends: game-data-packager",
there's no clear rule.

[Chris Peterson (cpete)]

I'm a little unclear how the whole *-data package works to be honest. If the data package isn't available in the archive, is there a use case for having it in the Depends line?

[Chris Peterson (cpete)]

Quoting Simon from the Debian bug mail:

>The way this has generally been handled in the past is to depend on
>
>foo-data (>= some suitable version) | game-data-packager
>
>so that if a user has used g-d-p to prepare a suitable version of foo-data
>on another machine (perhaps a more powerful one) and installed it on the
>current machine, they aren't forced to install game-data-packager and
>all of its dependencies for no good reason. It seems that this matches
>what Alexandre has done in alex4.
>
>This was discussed with the Debian ftp team while packaging some of the
>other games supported by game-data-packager (I can't remember which one,
>perhaps iortcw or openjk) and they consider this dependency structure
>to be a valid representation of what the game really needs.

With this information, it seems like the correct course here is to discard my patch and request the removal of alex4-data from the archive.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package alex4 - 1.1-10ubuntu1

---------------
alex4 (1.1-10ubuntu1) noble; urgency=medium

  * d/control: Drop alex4-data from Depends (LP: #2045607)
    - Avoid alex4-data NBS since alex4 no longer builds this package
      and can be safely replaced with game-data-packager

 -- Chris Peterson <email address hidden> Mon, 04 Dec 2023 18:13:49 -0800