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Deb, rpm et al don't help here at all. You can't use their dependencies or you'd need to provide builds for different versions of the same distro (because many
by faho 5y ago
Deb, rpm et al don't help here at all.
You can't use their dependencies or you'd need to provide builds for different versions of the same distro (because many many many libraries aren't that stable, and distros typically only provide one version of each).
And you probably don't want to run your own repository (and I'm not even sure apt can do repositories with a login, so you'd be making your game available to everyone with the link), so you can't use their update functionality either.
So then all you have left is a bad archive format - essentially a distro-specific .zip that's more annoying to build.
The other tools ship dependencies with the program, so they don't have this particular issue. AppImage and Flatpak are also cross-distro, while snap is tied to Canonical and awkward on other distros.
- zxzax 5y agoThis is not really a problem for open source games with an active Debian/Fedora maintainer. If there are interested packagers and you give them source code to work with, I've noticed they will be happy to build and test your package and try to keep it updated. The point of using deb/rpm is to integrate with the distro. If you want to go directly to customers and you have no intention of tying your package to the distro release cycle and working with their package maintainers, then yes, it seems it would always be a bad fit.
- faho 5y agoFor open source games, sure. But this isn't an open source game, as far as I can see, and most games aren't. Also I often find the fixed releases of most distros to be a bad fit for games because the stability argument matters less and less - there's little in the way of backward compatibility to keep, and hence no real reason not to upgrade. (not that I'm much of a believer in fixed releases to begin with)
- zxzax 5y agoI guess that's why most games are a bad fit for trying to ship as part of an open source Linux distribution, where the requirement to get packages upstream is that they have to be open source and compatible with the distro's usage and redistribution policies.