Arch Linux User Repository

@malathion You need to log out and log in again after adding yourself to the games group for the group membership to take effect: if you use groups instead of groups $(whoami), you will see the effective group memberships, which will not contain the newly added group until you log in again.

Thanks. I am in the 'games' group but according to console output Darkmod.cfg cannot be written. Also, I cannot write to the directory from a shell either:

$ pwd
/opt/thedarkmod
$ groups $(whoami)
games audio snapper ryan sudoers
$ touch hi
touch: cannot touch 'hi': Permission denied
$

@malathion This is not an issue with the PKGBUILD, instead it indicates that your locally built package thedarkmod-bin-2.07-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz is corrupt, e.g. because the build process got interrupted. Please delete the faulty package and try building it again. You might also want to have a look at switching the compression algorithm from xz to zstd since compressing large packages like this one can take quite a long time with xz.

error: could not extract /opt/thedarkmod/tdm_models02.pk4 (Lzma library error:  No progress is possible)
error: problem occurred while upgrading thedarkmod-bin
error: could not commit transaction
error: failed to commit transaction (transaction aborted)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

@mjr4077au Like loathingkernel said, it is entirely possible to build the main executable from the source tarball thedarkmod.2.07.src.7z. Note that you will have to patch the build scripts to be compatible with Python 3. 2to3 can help with that, though some manual work is still required:

2to3 --write --no-diffs SConstruct sys/scons/scons_utils.py sys/scons/SConscript.gl
sed --in-place "s/popen2, //; \
                s/open(conf_filename, 'w')/open(conf_filename, 'wb')/; \
                s/string.split/str.split/" \
                SConstruct sys/scons/scons_utils.py sys/gllog/logfunc.py sys/gllog/read.py

After these modifications you can use SCons to build the binary:

scons BUILD='release' TARGET_ARCH='x64'

The build process should get easier with the upcoming version 2.08 of The Dark Mod, which will switch to the more widely used CMake build system.

I do see value in having an additional package building from source, but I am not going to create it myself: I don't really play this game, I took over the package maintenance for reasons of moderation.

@mjr4077au, because noone has submitted such a package. This is a -bin package, and as such it is fine to repackage binaries, consult the wiki about package naming conventions and suffixes. You are more than welcome to submit a thedarkmod package where it builds from source.

Is there any reason why this is using the binary release and not compiling using the source?

I get that the conflict in the package "thedarkmod" is that, being the name the official one, it shall only contain official assets.

On the other hand reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_submission_guidelines#Rules_of_submission:

• "The submitted PKGBUILDs must not build applications already in any of the official binary repositories under any circumstances. Exception to this strict rule may only be packages having extra features enabled and/or patches in comparison to the official ones."

And seeing that such alternative packages are common in the AUR, for example:

• ttf-google-fonts-git

• ttf-google-fonts-opinionated-git: with updated version of some fonts

• ttf-google-fonts-typewolf: selection of the above fonts

I understand that it's perfectly possible to provide an alternative version of the package as long as it suggest it's a modified one, and provides valuable alternative functionalities.

So I'm providing an alternative version for this package, called "the-darkmod-tweaked", with the following enhancements over the official bundle:

• Separated saved games and downloaded mission repository for each user.
• Missions cache auto-cleanup.
• Enhanced installation speed compared with the official installer.

My suggestion is very simple: recognize that good enough working software today is always more desirable than a perfect one that will never come.

Like I said, feel free to

• either provide a clear and well-written wrapper that runs the game from a user directory (as you are well aware, the current state of your software was rejected not only by the Arch Linux community, but also by an upstream The Dark Mod developer), or
• even better, work directly with upstream to resolve the long-standing bug to be able to run the game from a read-only base directory.

I feel like this conversation is going in circles, please refrain from posting further comments unless they contain concrete, actionable suggestions or actual bug reports, I am going to ignore everything else from your side.