Packaging bug - Image file alteration causes issues

We have gotten multiple complaints about this. Until now, I hadn't realised it was due to a packaging error.

This does seem like a serious packaging flaw.

http://code.google.com/p/hedgewars/issues/detail?id=102

http://hedgewars.org/node/2614#comment-17843

Also people stopping by IRC.

I understand Ubuntu's need to squash image sizes down as much as poss. (esp. for stuff on the LiveCD)
But perhaps some sort of flag needs to be added to debs to toggle whether images are optimised?
Default to never optimise images, and enable only when known to cause no issues

We already optimise all our PNGs anyway, and try very hard to remember to recheck them all before releasing.

Optimising is harmless if done none-lossily and can save a lot of space, but shouldn't offer much benefit to Hedgewars since we're always concerned about size already.

A more useful optimisation if they are concerned about space would be if we release a bugfix hedgewars, to not release a bugfix hedgewars-data even if nothing changes. I have no idea why they do that. Requires downloading a huge amount of redundant data.

They can't link a 0.9.14.1 hedgewars package to a 0.9.14 hedgewars-data ?

On advice from #ubuntu-bugs, I've added pkgbinarymangler to the affected list

Sorry to bump this,
but seeing as this affects an unknown number of applications in unknown ways I think this should be quite high on the priority list
I'm sure games are not the only programs that depend on the image files they ship being unaltered

The fact that images are being altered with unpredictable consequences for applications will surely cause many unneeded bug reports if this issue hangs around for too long

Thanks for pointing this out. Most non-games applications just use libpng, where the depth of the image doesn't matter.

But indeed games often do some special tricks; as a first step I could disable the PNG compression for packages in the "games" section, which would include hedgewars as well. Does that sound reasonable to you?

That sounds great
Thank you

However I can't help but worry that this will cause hard-to-narrow-down issues for other types of programs as well
(esp. with the work going on to include commercial apps - seemingly unintrusive changes to the packaging breaking stuff, with no easy way to debug)

Will rebuild hedgewars once the fixed mangler is in.

This bug was fixed in the package pkgbinarymangler - 89

---------------
pkgbinarymangler (89) natty; urgency=low

  * pkgstripfiles: Games are prone to rely on a particular PNG image format,
    so skip PNG optimization for "Section: games". Add test case.
    (LP: #685421)
  * pkgstripfiles: Also skip PNG squashing if $NO_PNG_PKG_MANGLE is set; this
    allows packages to selectively disable PNG optimization without disabling
    the other parts of pkgbinarymangler. Add test case.
  * debian/control: Bump Standards-Version to 3.9.1 (no changes necessary).
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:50:46 +0100

This bug was fixed in the package hedgewars - 0.9.14.1-1build1

---------------
hedgewars (0.9.14.1-1build1) natty; urgency=low

  * No-change rebuild against current pkgbinarymangler to leave our PNGs
    alone. (LP: #685421)
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Fri, 10 Dec 2010 14:29:48 +0100

Note that the package currently doesn't build because the haskell toolchain is broken right now:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libghc6-hslogger-dev : Depends: libghc6-unix-dev-2.4.0.0-297f3 but it is not installable

as soon as that gets fixed, the build can be retried.

brilliant,
thanks for the quick response