[Scummvm-devel] Re: ScummVM release schedule / plans

[Tore Anderson]

* Tore Anderson

 >  Although not serving the goal of full SCUMM support, one of the
 > things I'd like to see most is that save games and such are saved to
 > a pre-defined directory under $HOME (~/.local/share/scummvm/?) instead
 > of $PWD.

* Max Horn
 
 > OK, file a feature request then!

  Didn't I just?  ;-)

  (I've been meaning to for a long time, though, just haven't gotten around
 to it yet.)

 > I am a bit puzzled about that particular location you suggest, but if
 > that is the debian standard, well, fine...

  It's not Debian's standard, but freedesktop.org's - a project that
 attempts to standardise how desktop applications work on *NIX.  Doesn't
 matter to me, though, ~/.scummvm/ would be just as fine, but as fd.o
 seems to have a fairly high adoption rate it may soon be the de-facto
 standard it could probably be worth-while trying to adhere to it.

* Tore Anderson

 >   Another thing would be to have some standardized location for
 > site-wide installation of games,

* Max Horn

 > I am still opposed to adding such a feature.
 >
 > As I understand it, the main motivations are:
 > 1) Make it easier to add a debian package
 > beneath-a-steel-sky". Well... that's not something I am really
 > concerned about... installing BASS manually isn't that hard now
 > either. So while I see the bonus, it seems rather small to me...

  The BASS package has been in Debian for quite a while already.

 > 2) Make it easier to have the installation shared by many users
 >   This is actually the primary reason I am opposed. A site wide
 > installation for the freeware'd games like BASS is of course fine. But
 > it would automatically also work for the other games, and those are
 > not freeware, and a site-wide use in most cases will be
 > illegal. Granted, people could use it legally; like if you use it, and
 > your family. But then, it shouldn't be a big problem to keep 2-5
 > scummvm config files in sync, and after all, you aren't adding new
 > games that often, are you? I can't imagine anybody having more people
 > share that config and still doing it legally. OTOH I can imagine many
 > scenarios were people use it illegally.
 > 3) Anything else? Enlighten me...
 >
 > ScummVM is a game, for end users, for single user setups. It's used in
 > most cases with non-free data files. Support for server setups is
 > beneficial only to a very small portion of our users. OTOH it's easy
 > to imagine illegal setups benefiting from such "site-wide" support.
 > 
 > Any feature in ScummVM which benefits illegal use, and benefits only a
 > few legal users (and that in a very limited way), is in my eyes
 > suspicious. That's also why I am opposed to adding support for playing
 > games directly from .zip files (a la PhysFS), which has been suggested
 > in the past.

  I think you're blowing this way out of proportion.

  I believe you're wrong when you say that "site-wide use in most cases
 will be illegal".  I think the typical "family" installation is much
 more likely to be common than the "server" installation you speak of.

  My impression of the typical warez junkie is that he downloads stuff of
 the net and installs it on his personal workstation to play.  When he
 aids others to do the same thing, he uploads it to his friends or
 whatever through diverse file transfer protocols.  I don't see how
 supporting system-wide game installations will aid these actions nor
 spur them to happen more frequently.

  Also, it's worth noting that the packages of the free games (such as
 the Debian beneath-a-steel-sky one) generally install the games into
 system-wide locations.  All of those users will benefit from having
 ScummVM automatically find the available games, and I believe that a
 significant number of users have installed that package[0].  At the
 very least, they're many more than the "only a few" you suggest.
 For what it's worth, it is on behalf of those users I request the
 feature.

  I don't think it's an important feature worth spending a lot of time
 on, but it would be nice to have, that's all.

  [0]  http://popcon.debian.org/ shows the BASS package with a
       installation count of 89.  The highest installation count of
       any package is 2675, which we may assume is present on every
       Debian system.  If we invent the fact that there's a total of
       267500 Debian systems world-wide, we may conclude[1] that
       there's 8900 Debian systems which have BASS installed in a
       system-wide and legit manner.
  [1]  Of course, that is just ludicrous.  But you do get my point?  :)

-- 
Tore Anderson