I thought being packaged by other distributions was only required if the package needed an exemption from another requirement. For example if it hadn't been updated in awhile.

There are several examples of software in the repository that aren't packaged by other mainstream distributions. Telegram comes to mind.

Any chance to repoen this? :/ It's the best alternative for minecraft launcher out there.

With all due respect to Solus and the people giving their time freely to develop it. It feels like packages are rejected based on no one wanting to bother packaging something that isn't of personal interest to them.

When people say "with all due respect", rarely do they mean it :)

I will say however that @DataDrake is incorrectly interpreting what the 2-distro-rule is:

If the software appears in Debian and/or Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE, in the currently active, core repositories, the maintainer is permitted to waive some entry requirements

Now, to clarify, this does not mean that the software has to already exist in those distros. That clause (rule is a bad name) exists only as an option for making some stuff easier to get
into the repos, i.e. Dead On Arrival packages. The one linked, isn't.

That said, @Oatwalker, you also reinterpreted the package request form, and one of the conditions there is to not provide master.zip style URLs. Which you've done.
The correct source URI for the latest was https://github.com/MultiMC/MultiMC5/archive/0.5.1.tar.gz

Anyway, getting back to the point at hand. The software request hasn't actually been explained too well, meaning that maintainers have to then go and fully research it themselves.
The idea of the package request process is to save time, not duplicate it.

So, things I would want to know before making my decision:

• How are you all using Minecraft?
• Is Oracle JDK a requirement? Because we're unable to ship that.

Just browsing around, I saw this on the multimc build instructions:

MultiMC is a portable application and is not supposed to be installed into any system folders. That would be anything outside your home folder. Before runing make install, make sure you set the install path to something you have write access to. Never build this under an administrator/root level account. Don't use sudo. It won't work and it's not supposed to work.

I think that alone would make it a bad candidate for a distro to distribute.

@graemelion thank you for that, I would agree that it blocks inclusion (as the developers tell you not to)

No problem @ikey , I was actually just looking at it to see if I could package a real world request :D Just to see if I could do it, when I came across that.

To all those who Google and see this thread, like I did, I was able to build/compile the launcher using Qt-Creator and following the build instructions on their GitHub.

I'll also answer @ikey's questions.

• How are you all using Minecraft?

This launcher is one of the most popular non-official launchers out there. It allows you to easily create multiple instances of Minecraft, add modifications to the game and a lot lot more.

I personally use MultiMC's launcher because the only supported/official launcher here, https://solus-project.com/articles/gaming/minecraft/en/, is over a year out of date.
Old launcher installed w/ Solus's instructions

New launcher

New launcher tarball: https://launcher.mojang.com/mc-staging/download/Minecraft_staging.tar.gz
New launcher Reddit post by Mojang staff: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/5opl31/help_us_test_the_new_minecraft_launcher_now_with/

I feel like either MultiMC or the new official Minecraft launcher should be made into a package, because the one shown in Solus's post has been deprecated for over a year now.

• Is Oracle JDK a requirement? Because we're unable to ship that.

I've built MultiMC successfully with openjdk-8 from the Solus repositories. It shouldn't matter what JDK you use.

(Sorry if this is a bit of a necropost. I feel like this is still pretty relevant because the currently supported launcher is so out of date. If you'd like, I could make a request for the new official Minecraft launcher to be packaged?)

This still doesn't solve to the original problem I mentioned. This product is NOT MEANT to be a system wide product. How do you package a product that is unsupported in the configuration you are wanting to use it? This must install to system directories (or /opt) because that's how distribution package systems work generally, and this project is not supported by upstream if you do it that way.

I don't see how it can ever be part of Solus when it is not supported by upstream in the way we'd need to distribute it. Other distros may be okay playing tricks here, but I don't think Solus would do that.

But I can't speak for ikey and them. Just re-iterating that the upstream opinion on this has not changed, it would still be unsupported if we were to make a systemwide package.

@graemelion It can be installed system-wide.

AUR package: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=multimc5
Void package (official repo): https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/blob/master/srcpkgs/MultiMC/template
Nix package (official repo): https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/games/multimc/default.nix

@JoshStrobl Is this still blocked, or would I be able to submit a package? It would be a shame if it's not included in the distribution since it's WAY better than the official launcher and it's overall a very well written piece of software.

I just caught this, as I'm not really using Solus anymore. But MultiMC hasn't really changed their admonition not to use this on a system level / system-wide in BUILD.md. Other distros not adhering to suggestions given probably shouldn't affect Solus' decision for quality reasons.

But I'm just responding because I was @'d.

Using MultiMC fine with the AUR package on arch, installed system wide. I don't think that you have to explicitly go by MultiMC's statement

I chatted with the devs on Discord a while back and they were very explicit about not wanting distributions to distribute their own binaries (if they choose to do so they would need to remove all MultiMC branding, assets etc). A big part of this is that they are going to be adding support for Microsoft accounts shortly and the Azure oauth credentials required for that support are NOT going to be included in the git repo (package maintainers would need to apply for and configure a set on behalf of Solus).

However they are more than happy for distributions to distribute a package containing a .desktop file/icon and a wrapper script that handles downloading the official binaries to the users home folder and launching them. Users are then able to make use of the update system built into MultiMC. There's a script that they use with the Debian package in the main MultiMC repo and I have used this to successfully build a package which is completely functional. I use it every day in fact, and would be more than happy to submit it and maintain it if that solution is considered acceptable.

@TheCultLeader666, we actually do want to respect the wishes of upstream devs, even if doing so results in packages not being added to the Solus repos. We're not going to blatantly disrespect their wishes like the maintainers of that AUR package are.