Re: Can we package NetHack?

["Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu>]

On Sun, May 29, 2016 at 6:54 PM, Kei Kebreau <kei@openmailbox.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 30 May 2016 00:13:00 +0200
> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:
>
>> Kei Kebreau <kei@openmailbox.org> 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. :-)

This isn't a problem.  Stateful files in home directories or elsewhere
are not managed by Guix.  A .nethack directory sounds like a fine
solution to me.

- Dave