Re: Can we package NetHack?

[Kei Kebreau]

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. :-)

-- 
Kei (GPG Key: 4096R/E6A5EE3C19467A0D)

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