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- Monday, January 12
- ==================
-
- Debian packaging
- ----------------
-
- A lot of time today with
- the [Debian New Maintainer's Guide](https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/)
- and google for a project that needs some simple packages.
-
- This is one of those things where the simple cases are simple and then it's
- easy to get lost in a thicket of overlapping mechanisms and terminology.
-
- Thought for providers of technical HOWTOs:
-
- If you're describing the cumulative assembly of a file structure, provide a
- copy (repository, tarball, whatever) of that file structure.
-
- (I should probably take this notion to heart.)
-
- Things to remember:
-
- * http://man.he.net/man1/fakeroot
-
- MS-DOS / AGT
- ------------
-
- So I was scrolling through archive.org's newly-shiny MS-DOS archive (with the
- crazy in-browser DOSBOX emulation), trying to think of what to look for.
-
- I found some old friends:
-
- - [_Crystal Caves_][cc]
- - [_Commander Keen_][keen]
- - [_Heretic_][h] --- still a pretty solid game and maybe my favorite iteration of the Doom Engine
- - [_Rise of the Triads_][rott] --- there is absolutely _no way_ that ROTT actually
- looked as bad as this emulation at the time on baseline hardware, but we'll let
- that slide --- the graphics may have been better than they show here, but it
- was the Duke Nukem property of its moment, which is to say ultimately a
- regressive and not-very-consequential signpost on the way to later
- developments
-
- And then I got to thinking about the Adventure Game Toolkit, which was this
- sort of declarative, not-really-programmable interpreter for simple adventure
- games. The way I remember it, you wrote static descriptions of rooms, objects,
- and characters. It was a limited system, and the command interpreter was
- pretty terrible, but it was also a lot more approachable than things like TADS
- for people who didn't really know how to program anyway. (Like me at the time.)
-
- I'd like to get AGT running on squiggle.city, just because. It turns out
- there's a [portable interpreter called AGiliTY][agility], although maybe not
- one that's well packaged. I'll probably explore this more.
-
- [agility]: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXagtXagility.html
- [keen]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Commander_Keen_1_-_Marooned_on_Mars_1990
- [cc]: https://archive.org/details/msdos__1CRYSTL_shareware
- [h]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Heretic_-_Shadow_of_the_Serpent_Riders_1996
- [rott]: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Rise_of_the_Triad_-_The_Hunt_Begins_Deluxe_Edition_1995
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