This is the content of an email that I sent to r.blankendaal@quicknet.nl but was undelivered (unknown address). So posting here instead.
Hi Ronald,
Firstly, thanks for the excellent DOSBox Game Launcher, which I've used for years on all three of the OSes (Linux, Win and Mac) that I regularly use. Mostly I'm in Linux (Ubuntu) these days, so I decided to "Debianize" your program with appropriate Debian-style packaging.
Here's a new PPA that I've created with a working DBGL 0.83 for Xenial and newer Ubuntu systems:
https://launchpad.net/~savoury1/+archive/ubuntu/dbgl
For your reference (given you created DBGL! 😀 ) the way I packaged it is:
* Place all DBGL core jar files under /usr/share/dbgl (incl. lib dir)
* Optional i18n files (separate package) also go under /usr/share/dbgl
* Place dbgl script in /usr/bin and modify for fixed install path
* Add a package dependency for DOSBox 0.74-3 which is also in the same PPA, for easy installation of both by running "sudo apt install dbgl"
To make the source archive smaller I also removed src/dist/winshared, src/dist/macshared folders as well as dosbox binaries from src/dist/linux32 and linux64. None of that is needed for the Launchpad build so it reduced the source archive (using xz) to only 7.3MB (similar size to the final size of either the amd64 or i386 .deb packages for dbgl, which are 6.2MB and 6.1MB respectively).
Although packaging DBGL like this does affect the portability factor, it's no doubt accurate that anyone wanting to run it portably knows how already (in terms of being able to do the simple tasks of downloading the Linux archive from your site and extract that to whatever location). So for folk wanting that option they can just use your original Linux binary build. Yet, many using Ubuntu/Debian systems do want a Debian style package for ease of install and software management and now it's easily done on any system with the new PPA.
Reason for choosing to package version 0.83 for now is that I've had various issues on my Ubuntu system with DBGL 0.90 including strange errors that do not exist in earlier versions (up to 0.83). So I will have to do further testing of 0.90 when I have time. Things like snapshot images not appearing in the main interface happened for instance, even though the images were working fine in DBGL <= 0.83 so not sure what the issue, will have to look into it further.
Please let me know any feedback about my choices of packaging DBGL and if you have suggestions for changes/improvements then I'd be glad to hear them. Thanks again for a great tool for those of us who love to play classic old games sometimes!
Cheers!