Hi Axel, Am 08.08.2018 um 23:02 schrieb Axel Beckert: > Source: debian-games > Severity: wishlist > Version: 2.4 > > The debian/changelog entry for 2.4 says: > > * Remove finest-light binary package. Nowadays modern computers should be > capable of running all free software games in Debian without > restrictions. > > The latter is neither true nor should it be a reason to remove this IMHO > very useful metapackage: > > * There are definitely many modern computers without graphics > hardware acceleration, espcially in the single board computer > segment (ARM, MIPS, etc., which Debian also targets). > > * On all devices which boot up on SD or MicroSD cards, disk space is > scarce and hence a collection of lightweight games makes also sense > for more powerful computers which don't have a hard disk or real SSD. > > * Debian does not only run on "modern" computers.
This was not the only reason but surely one of the most important ones. Compared to games-finest, games-finest-light always had less than half of the reported popcon installations. It was a subset of games-finest anyway minus 21 packages that are more hardware demanding or occupy more disk space and resources. The target group of debian-games are gamers and I simply assume that in 2018 most desktop computers and even older models are shipped with a hardware accelerated video card. Even the oldest video card is capable of running OpenArena whose engine is already 20 years old. The vast majority of gamers use amd64 hardware and nowadays a typical desktop computer provides hundreds of gigabyte of disk space. ARM and MIPS gamers are a tiny, tiny minority of another minority: FOSS gamers. I have also recently learned that MIPS is strong in one segment, routers, but I have never heard that they seriously target gamers. games-finest-light always felt like a duplicate to me because it contained 80% of the packages of games-finest. Someone who has to make compromises due to disk space or hardware constraints can simply decide to not install those 21 games which were omitted from games-finest-light or decide to install games manually by looking at the recommended list from games-finest. I think the idea to include games-finest-light was good but I don't feel that the omission of games-finest-light makes a big overall difference and I don't intend to bring it back. Regards, Markus
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