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Avoid tools/libraries duplication
Added by
journeyman As you install Good Old Games you install more and more times the same tools (to pick the most used DosBox, but also libSDL, ScummVM, ...) which wastes disk space and/download time; a probably better way to do this could be a separate installer/package which is detected in installation time (if not present ask user to get and/or download directly from installer or thru package management) or directly in download-time if using the gog-downloader/galaxy-client.
boltronics @jalister No, when launching DosBox, you can specify a different config directory for every game, so having one DosBox install isn't a problem.
There are some issues here with the way GOG has setup Deb packages that relate to this wishlist item. Scumm/DosBox/Wine applications are included in the Deb, so yes, that's a separate install for every game. I have hundreds of games and a small SSD, so that's a lot of waste. It's considered very bad practise to put together packages this way (I don't think Debian ever allows its own official packages to get away with this type of thing).
So what if there's a DosBox update that improves performance and doesn't sacrifice compatibility? What if there is a security issue in Wine that could lead to a remote compromise and requires patching? GOG would have to update *every single package* which I doubt they would bother with - which is quite a concern.
I'll also note that GOG only compiles packages on Ubuntu 14.04 currently. I run Debian, so none of the GOG builds work for me (they could have compiled with an older version of libc even if they only officially supported the newer version in 14.04, but they didn't for some reason and in doing so have broken compatibility with a bunch of distros). However if GOG just had their deb packages depend on the dosbox/wine/scummvm packages provided by the distribution, there is only a single package I need to fix. As it stands, every package is broken and I need to fix them all up manually. :(
I was going to add that GOG would ideally also provide a separate source package for DosBox/Wine/ScummVM and customers could just build that themselves with dpkg-buildpackage (if their distro didn't already provide it or if it only supported an older version, and the GOG-provided debs weren't working due to the libc issue those have)... but I can't even find the source code for this stuff. They'll need to fix that.
In any case, separate packages for these components is how it should be done.
Jalister I think GOG might do this because different DosBox games require different settings. While I would like to only have one DosBox installed, I would rather have the method that works the best. I don't think 20 instances of DosBox uses that much disk space.
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