A report from the RPM summit

So when is RPM going to gain support for installing packages that are 4GB+ in size (which it may be technically capable of doing, but the user experience for it is pure shit) and have a distro-standard way of updating 4GB+ RPMs when only 10M of it has changed, and have a standardized way of the RPM telling the package management system (at whatever layer is appropriate) of where to find those updates?

Until the Linux packaging process can handle installing Real Games, Linux is dead in the water on Real Desktops used by Real People, because despite what most of the Linux developers think, just about every regular person who has a PC or laptop plays games.

The idea I constantly see propagated about how "regular users just want Internet and Email" is the encyclopedia definition of "head in the sand," "out of touch with reality," and "wishful thinking."

The sad fact is that it is easier to install the Windows version of NWN on WINE than it is to install the Linux native version of NWN. Seriously. The installer broke barely a month after the game first came out, and it has no support from the packaging system because no packaging system can deal with that much data and sanely let the user apply patches without downloading the whole damn package over again.

The requirements are simple:
1) Installation must make it easy to install from CD/DVD
1b) Even if we had some hypothetical triple-A Open/Free game title, no distro in the world is going to host packages for it in their package repositories -- some games are bigger than the entire distro by itself
2) Installation must be able to keep track of many GB of files
3) System updates must be able to reasonable deal with small updates to those large sets of data
4) System updates must be able to check with third-party services since this software won't be hosted in distro repositories
4b) The user should not have to do anything special to get this update service working; installing the software must Just Work with the system's package updater
5) The system must be standardized and stable so that old CDs/DVDs keep working in the future and become artificially broken every 6 months when the packaging system adds extra barriers despite the binary libraries and such still being compatible with old binary applications
6) Either the core package system or a standardized GUI driver must support installation "configuration," e.g. picking what components of a larger application to install
6b) Supporting EULAs and product keys would be useful to support real-world proprietary games, but since all of these requirements are just as valid for theoretical Open/Free games, it is not mandatory that support for EULAs/product-keys be present

Outside of games, packaging in Linux needs no changes. With games, packaging in Linux needs massive changes. So either Linux remains a niche nerd OS and appliance/server OS and the whole packaging debate can just go away, or Linux can make a serious effort at gaining the desktop market and it needs to focus on the application that actually drives the desktop with Real People -- games.