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Contributor Bratmon on FlightGear

Flightgear Packaging Rethink  
Written by ChrisB the 23 May 10 at 10:23. New
Flightgear is an amazing piece of open source software, but its current implementation for ubuntu is poor.

There are two main problems, installing scenery and installing aircraft. Both are normal functions but to archive either you have to change the permissions on the correct directories and manually download unzip and move the aircraft/scenery files to their correct locations.

When installing flightgear on ubuntu you also have to install the default scenery and aircraft. This should change as some people have downloaded the scenery or aircraft separately or have them on other media and this is just a waste of time and bandwidth.
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Solution #1: Use Apt to Install Scenery and Aircraft
Written by ChrisB the 23 May 10 at 10:23.
The Flighgear Aircraft and Scenery should be packaged for ubuntu. As there is over 1gig of aircraft (100's of packages) and 13gig of scenery it might not be suitable to host them in the main ubuntu repos (space and clutter), they could be hosted in a launchpad project package archive (Could be added when you install the fgfs-base package). However the default aircraft should be hosted in the main ubuntu repos and these are required to run the game (Flightgear can download scenery on demand).

The aircraft and scenery should be packaged separately with proper screenshots and information for especially the aircraft as this already exists.

This would allow the fgfs-base package to recommend the default aircraft but allow users to just install the base package if they desire to. This would also link flightgear to the ubuntu upgrade system allowing fixes and patches to be released properly for aircraft and scenery and the aircraft and scenery to update during a release upgrade.

This can then be implemented in the software centre and any flightgear related gui.

(I have begun testing packages to install aircraft and have uploaded some to my ppa over at https://edge.launchpad.net/~cbaines/+archive/fgfs-aircraft )
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Solution #2: Add (an) Aircraft and Scenery manager(s) to FlightGear
Written by marshmallow1304 the 7 Jun 10 at 01:21.
FlightGear should implement its own built-in system for handling additional optional content. This would be much more suitable than an apt repository, since the utility could provide information specific to the type of extras being offered (like screenshots and technical information about the aircraft). However most of this (screenshot and text description) could go in a deb.

For an example, look at X-Moto. When you start it, it checks online for new and updated levels and downloads and installs them to the user's home folder from within the program. X-Moto themes are managed in the same way.

Additionally, this would mean that FlightGear aircraft and scenery can be handled individually. Instead of downloading a huge .deb containing ALL optional aircraft, the in-game content manager could download individual aircraft. Also, even if each aircraft was packaged separately in an apt repository, the large number of packages would cause unnecessary clutter in the package manager.

See the 2 comments or propose a solution (latest comment the 25 May 10 at 19:56) >>