Originally posted by elanthis
View Post
Second of all, upgrades are easily handled with such a build system. You also do not need to repackage all the game assets. That part is actually really easy to do as a simple tar.bz2 file can be used for those items. The only thing that has to be distro specific is the installer. So you would have multiple installer distro specific installers in rpm and deb formats and one generic tarball that carries the assets. Also web distribution is typically a lot cheaper then hard media distribution and it reaches a greater audience. Steam/iTunes/etc all show that. It also usually means less "fingers in the pie" when it comes to the revenue stream.
The per-distro packages are completely non-maintainable. Many of the actual distributions today are already having a lot of growing pains maintaining their repositories. Building the packages is just one tiny little part of the massive problem that the status quo of Linux installation has. Distributing, maintaining, debugging, and supporting the myriad of files necessary is very much a big part of the problem, and tools that just generate multiple packages don't solve any of that.
The space issue is also a huge problem with the distro silos. Let's pretend some big AAA game went fully Open Source. Would Fedora really be cool with having all of their mirrors add a 4GB game data file? And not just once; each version of Fedora would end up having that file duplicated to all the mirrors. Twice for each version: once for the base repository and again for the updates repository, assuming any patches for the game data are released. If the game were added to Fedora in version 15 then within two years that game alone would be consuming between 20GB and 40GB of space on every Fedora mirror.
And then duplicate that for each version of Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Mandrake, Arch, etc. etc. etc. Most of the common mirrors hosting Linux distros now will throw a fit and probably start refusing to host the distros, or they'll force the distros to split up their repositories and add yet more maintenance burden. Instead, let the game project site deal with the data. Let them mirror it. Let them figure out the logistics, and only really need a small handful of mirrors for just that data that anyone of any distro can use.
And then duplicate that for each version of Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Mandrake, Arch, etc. etc. etc. Most of the common mirrors hosting Linux distros now will throw a fit and probably start refusing to host the distros, or they'll force the distros to split up their repositories and add yet more maintenance burden. Instead, let the game project site deal with the data. Let them mirror it. Let them figure out the logistics, and only really need a small handful of mirrors for just that data that anyone of any distro can use.
Hey that would be great if a game went entirely opensource. That way they wouldn't even have to bother with any associated cost of mirroring and distribution. There are plenty of examples like that on openSUSE's build service as it is right now. As it is opensource you are free to host it on their beefy mirror infrastructure at no cost.
Really your making a mountain out of a molehill.
Comment