Re: Can we package NetHack?

[Ludovic Courtès]

"Thompson, David" <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 6:54 PM, Kei Kebreau <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Mon, 30 May 2016 00:13:00 +0200
>> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:
>>
>>> Kei Kebreau <address@hidden> skribis:
>>>
>>> > NetHack tries to modify its state files in the store and none of its
>>> > easily patchable directory variables allow anything different.
>>> > NetHack also doesn't allow a ~/.nethack directory to be created in
>>> > the user's directory upon running. Does anyone have any ideas or
>>> > other packages that do this sort of thing?
>>>
>>> I suppose the state files are essentially score files?  Don’t other
>>> games store things in /var/lib/something?  What do other distros do?
>>> :-)
>>>
>>> Ludo’.
>>
>> Yes, the state files are high score lists, locks for the world files
>> and such. The problem is that other distros give NetHack a directory to
>> write those files to that would be equivalent to writing to our store.
>> The only one I have seen that avoids this is NixOS. However, NixOS
>> creates a ".nethack" directory within the user's folder (among other
>> things) to work around this.
>>
>> I thought that this would be a problem for Guix, because installing and
>> removing NetHack cleanly would necessitate directly writing to and
>> erasing files within the user's directory. So I decided to mail the
>> list to see if anyone could find a solution. :-)
>
> This isn't a problem.  Stateful files in home directories or elsewhere
> are not managed by Guix.  A .nethack directory sounds like a fine
> solution to me.

Yes, I agree.

Note that this problem is not limited to Nixpkgs and Guix.  So perhaps
there’s also inspiration to be taken from Debian et al.

Ludo’.