[sldev] Packaging the viewer for Linux distributions

[Robin Cornelius]

On 10/5/07, Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 13:32 +0100, Robin Cornelius wrote:
> > Can we maybe think about splitting up the viewer (distribution) into
> > smaller packages. Surely the various artwork and supplied textures
> > remain pretty constant and it seems wasteful redistributing the same
> > data over and over again.
>
> Ah, something else on the to do list I've forgotten about. In Fedora,
> we've been encouraging upstream projects to separate (arch-independent)
> game data from source. This is advantageous for us, no only can we issue
> updates to the binaries without everyone having to re-download a large
> amount of game data, but the game data can be a "noarch" package, shared
> across all architectures, reducing storage requirements on our mirrors.
>
> LL already separates the "artwork" from the viewer source, which is most
> of the way there. What makes it much less useful to us is the fact that
> a new artwork tarball comes out with every source release. Could LL
> avoid releasing a new artwork tarball unless it has actually changed? I
> haven't got around to diffing it and seeing how often it actually
> changes, if it is changing, maybe it shouldn't. ;P
>

Ok here goes, as i was at work today i though i would look at the
differences between artwork releases (instead of working) to see how
volatile we are :-

1.16.0.5    ->   1.17.0.12     No difference
1.17.0.12  ->   1.17.1.0       skins/textures/ +1 file
1.17.1.0    ->   1.17.2.0       No difference
1.17.2.0    ->   1.17.3.0       skins/textures/ +8 files
1.17.3.0    ->   1.18.0.6       No difference
1.18.0.6    ->   1.18.1.2       skins/textures/ +23 files
1.18.1.2    ->   1.18.2.1       No difference
1.18.2.1    ->   1.18.3.5       character/ +2 files
                                         skins/textures/ (+252 files -184 files)

The current artwork is broken down in to the following :-

8.1M    app_settings
7.7M    character
2.4M    res
172K    res-sdl
14M     skins

So mostly the artwork does not change very much, when it does its
mostly the skins/textures directory.

If skins/textures MUST change then prehpase this is worth splitting
into 2 arch independent packages. One for skins the other for
everything else?

Certainly this is worth doing as it can save 24MB (zipped) data
download each time and I think i will now split my .deb files to save
my own bandwidth on my server for my amd64 versions.

Can someone more knowledgeable than myself confirm if the
textures/skins updates are needed or are these things that can be
fetched inworld? eg just textures or are they part of the UI design.

Regards

Robin