Proposal: automatic install of data for packages requiring external data
The repository already features several packages that require external files, most often game assets that can't be distributed for legal reasons. Obviously, we (probably) can't legally distribute those files via the repository. However, I believe that there may be an alternative.
Steam provides the official tool SteamCMD (included in the debian non-free repositories). It provides steam login functionality and ability to download steam games via command line. As this is an official tool intended for this purpose, I think we should be able to use it. The biggest roadblock would be that steamcmd is currently only available for x86, but a quick search showed that several users had success getting steamcmd to run on arm with box86.
My proposal is thus: expand the package dependency management to allow for depending on steam games and automatically install and copy files as needed. This could be something like adding a Dependency[steam]
line, allowing the definition of a steam app id, source paths and target paths.
Ideally, we should also provide mechanisms to install from other platforms, but steam seems like it can be done easily and in a legal way.
However, while this feature would be useful, I fear it could blow the project way out of it's proportions. An alternative approach could be to allow plugins to handle parts of the installation process, e.g. taking care of the install of non-dbp and non-deb dependencies.
Any feedback regarding this idea is more than welcome.