Any Debian/Ubuntu packaging advice?

[Steven Pusser]

Would using gl-117 as a template be of any use for debianizing the program?

Calling the packages "lac" and "lac-data" seems just as obscure as "gl-117". I'd rather use "linux-air-combat".

We'd like to get it packaged for MX Linux, which is a Debian derivative.

[bbosen]

Hello Steven. Thanks for asking.

For a brief period I was using MX Linux in my development lab. Nice
distro! In my experience, our standard, published package compiled and
ran without any modifications on MX Linux.

For repository distribution, you asked "Would using gl-117 as a template
be of any use for debianizing the program"

Yes. LAC's prerequisites are EXACTLY the same as gl-117. I have
experimented with that idea and I found that simply changing the
filenames from gl-117's names to lac's names yields success. LAC has
more files, of course, but does not change the pattern.

You also asked about naming the distro package. "linux-air-combat" or
"LinuxAirCombat" are both better names than "lac". Yours is the first
packaging effort from a major Linux distro, so you will be setting the
pattern here. I trust your judgment.

-Bob-

[bbosen]

I just completed a YouTube "playlist" with six very short, narrated video clips showing EXACTLY how I compiled the latest version of LAC on a brand new MX Linux system yesterday. Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nygTDncht3k&list=PL1IYes9MY6lLuaSdUW_BRSUob0bjD6c14

As you can see from those brief video clips, it is very easy to compile LAC on MX Linux. LAC runs well on MX Linux, which has a nice "lightweight" feel to it. When using a mouse pointer for primary flight controls, there are no problems at all.

However, when using a joystick, everything works perfectly until the user attempts to exit LAC. At that point, the user's keyboard gets corrupted and it is necessary to unplug the USB joystick and kill a zombie LAC process with the well-known "kill -9" command from a command shell.

After plugging the USB joystick back in, LAC works correctly again until the player attempts to exit, whereupon the same cycle repeats.

I do not know why this happens only on MX Linux.

[Steven Pusser]

Thanks! I will take a stab at it, though I don't have a joystick to test per se, just a mouse and a usb game controller. It's easy to compile manually in seconds and install into /home on my gaming laptop in MX, as compared to packages like Libreoffice or gcc-9, which take hours and hours using all six cores! I just have to look at gl-117 to get tips for installing it into the system folders, which Debian packages must do.

[bbosen]

I'm very pleased to have you working on this. If you get stuck anywhere, let me know and I will give you priority support.

After you get LAC into the MX distro repository, even if you can't pay any attention to the joystick logic, any users suffering from the little MX joystick quirk can "work around" it easily, by unplugging the USB joystick prior to exiting LAC. I'll document that on the main LAC website as soon as it appears on MX.

[bbosen]

Steven,

I just updated the tools that I referenced above from version 7.92 to version 7.96 in support of your work. I also created a new section of these forums for use by LINUX "packagers" and distro managers. I hope it will be helpful to you and others that want to support LAC in official LINUX distros and repositories.

Here's a link to that new forum:

https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/lacinrepositories/

-Bob-

[bbosen]

This subject is continued in our new "LAC in Linux Repositories" here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/lacinrepositories/