glest: a free 3D real time strategy game

After almost a year of working on and off on the package, glest is now in the new queue.

Glest is really a free 3D real time strategy game with amazing graphics and really interesting game play.

So maybe you're wondering why did it took me so long to package it. Well, glest is mainly developed on a Windows platform and GNU/Linux is the platform it was later ported to. So this came with some problems:

• the game uses jam as a build system; don't get me started on the intelligence of this build system; I had to go through real pain to make it build
  
• the game is entirely written with "little endian" assumtion in mind
• apparently the editor is not functional on Linux yet, but there is a patch (I will enable this later, after some testing)
• the build system was not bootstrapped before building the tarball
• the linux build creates some symlinks and I had to do some really nasty tricks so that there are no unrepresentable changes in the source
• the upstream is currently not that active, but it used to be a lot less last year; it seesm that there is a motivation/time issue with the leader of the project
  
• upstream moved the project to sourceforge and they keep the code now in subversion, but I wasn't aware about this until recently
• there are a few people talking about forks and a real fork which proclaims itself ast the real project continuation; I suspect that all this mess appeared due to inactivity of upstream last year
• the game used a non-free font
  

Since when I started the packaging work I was using a PowerBook G4 as my main machine I was upset that the game was little endian only, so I started working on a patch. I made an incomplete patch but I got stuck at some point. Time passed by and I replaced my laptop and I wasn't able to continue working on the patch. So I kind of forgot about it. Before debconf I decided is time to do the upload for little endian machines, add the endianess patch disabled.

During debconf I asked Tolimar to make an upload, and it turns out that for some reason I still don't know, the build resulted in a statically linked binary. I was amazed since I didn't recall doing any changes that might have triggered this. At some point I suspected that the build system is broken on other arches than i386 (my main machine is amd64) and halted. This until a few days ago Joey Hess added a comment in the ITP bug pointing out that the game is ok. After a couple of emails I realized that the static issue was just some strange temporary issue on my machine and now the package is in NEW.

So, that's my excuse. I hope that upstream glest issue get fixed. If not, I'll probably package glevolution, too.