I think having popular games in [community] and thus available through pacman by default offers a good user experience. If they were in another repo several users will be left with the impression that Arch is lacking in packages, even if it's only a superficial impression. I agree that it's better to have them in community even if the
When someone previously threw a fit about large games in [community], one of the arguments for keeping them was that users expect them to be there and that that is the very point of the [community] repo... to provide packages users want. I'm torn on it, but I think mostly that given maintainership, community is a better place. If it's orphaned or otherwise not quite
On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 23:46, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote: perception isn't important. maintained, it makes more sense to move it to unsupported. Arch-Games was intended to be a supplement to community, not to replace it. It's fine to move it for maintenance issues, but I don't think there should be many reasons aside from that.
At the same time, I understand that there is only a small proportion of users who actually play games and thus the size/usage ratio is probably not justifiable. While understandable, I don't think it's too great to follow that concept very far. If we have official repos split by purpose, we may as well do it with other things than just games, and that could easily be ugly.
If we were to do this, PKGBUILDs and local source files should be made available for the games, preferably in a $repo.abs.tar.gz package as I've previously requested for arch-games (not sure if that went anywhere).
Well the short version is that abs expects a certain svn layout which we are nowhere close to and can't copy, as devtools (or dbscripts, whichever) relies on an svn feature that I don't believe git has. We could do it in other ways, but I really find that the simple method we have now works well. It's a tradeoff - git is easier to maintain, svn is more complicated but the feature that the repos use to make the repos/ area allows a guarantee that a PKGBUILD matches the .pkg in the repo. (More or less, pkgver-pkgrel anyway). http://archlinux-gaming.org/issues/104