Request for Review: nethack

[Luke Macken]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 06:00:15PM +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
| I think there's a way to get both of best worlds; how about this plan:
| 
| 1) Ask the Falcon's Eye upstream if he's going to release an update
| soon.  Despite of the rumours of the project being dead, he has
| repeatedly stated that a new version is in the works in public forums
| (albeit not too recently AFAIK).  Wait until end of this week for his
| reply.

...so we are going to have to bug the Falcon's Eye developers every time
we want a newer version of NetHack ? I'd rather follow NetHack
development, than some questionable fork.

| 2a) If NHFE maintainer doesn't reply or the new NHFE is far away, switch
| the Extras package to the more lively Vulture's Eye fork,
| http://www.darkarts.co.za/projects/vultures
| That includes NetHack 3.4.3 (the latest one).
|
| 2b) If NHFE upstream responds saying new NHFE including the latest
| "vanilla" NH is just around the corner, wait for that.
| 
| 3) No matter what the conclusion from 1) and 2) above is, tune the
| current nethack-* package in Extras so that running "nethack" launches
| the tty version, and "nethack-falconseye" (or -vultureseye) the GUI
| version.  And add a menu entry for the tty version, too.  And note
| availability of the tty version more prominently in the package's
| description.
| 
| Thoughts?  I think it would be inefficient use of resources to maintain
| two NH packages in Extras, given that we can most likely get both the
| latest and greatest traditional NetHack, as well as the GUI eye candy in
| the same package.

These graphical frontends are all forks, and offer me nothing but extra
crap on my system.  I'm not against carrying as many different
forks/frontends as humanly possibly, but if you want a 'standard'
nethack game with tty and a graphical frontend, the vanilla version can
be built with X, qt, or gnome guis as well.  I just not seeing how we
benefit from restricting Fedora users to install *extremely* unstable
graphical versions of a text based game.

luke