Invitation to a cross-distro games packaging/patching/maintaining mailing list

[Richard Hartmann]

Due to feedback by FreeBSD devs, I am re-sending this email to
ports@ -- the rest is a verbatim copy of the mail I sent to the
individual maintainers.



Hi all,

you are receiving this email because you are listed as maintainer of one
or more ports in FreeBSD's game category. I do apologize for writing to
all of you directly, but there does not seem to be any games mailing list
for FreeBSD.


The Debian and Ubuntu games teams have merged completely and the Fedora
team has been working more and more with us to reduce duplicated work. We
have been using the Debian games mailing list until now, but we decided
that a distro-agnostic list would be better. Gentoo and SuSE are starting
to hop on board and the more the merrier :)

As Games are somewhat special in that they in general need more patches
than usual packages and that they often have a dead upstream, we plan to
discuss some ways there to try and collaborate more.

We will start defining requirements and possible layouts for
below-upstream repositories, soon. You could then pull from there and
get a common, patched version. ports-specific patches would be applied
in your local repositories via your existing processes.


I hope I managed to interest a few of you and hope to see you on
games at lists.freedesktop.org [1] soon. For an introduction, read
Miry's email [2].


Richard

PS: I do apologize if you think this is spam. I simply did not find any
better way to contact you all.

PPS: I excluded ports@, gnome@, kde@ and perl@ from this email.
Only real persons are on BCC

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/games
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/games/2008-November/000006.html