Hi; I've been packaging Dwarf Fortress and related utilities for Fedora: I've been looking into possibly packaging rubble as a solution for installing mods, and was curious as to your thoughts.
Right now the dwarffortress and dfhack packages work by installing their contents system-wide (into /usr/lib/dfhack, /usr/share/dwarffortress, etc.). When you actually run "dwarffortress", the ~/.dwarffortress/ directory is created in your home directory and raw files, data, binaries, etc. are symlinked or copied (depending on the type of file-- data/init is only ever copied once, for example, but raw files are symlinked) into this directory. Then each user has their own DF installation in their home directory, but when the package is updated, each user's installation is also updated.
(This is how the packages work on Arch, too; I more or less just ported them to Fedora).
This is great if you just want to play vanilla DF + dfhack, but not so great if you want to install mods or tilesets. But creating a modded installation should in principle be as easy as copying all the DF files from the system-wide installation into, say, ~/.dwarffortress-0.43.03-modded/ or something, and then installing mods on top of that directory using some tool.
So, I was wondering if you thought it made sense to use rubble as that tool? The idea would be that a rubble package is installed system-wide and some script is put into /usr/bin that creates a new user-modifiable DF installation somewhere in a user's home directory by copying all of DF and DH (so a user would have permissions to edit the raw/ directory and so updates to the system package don't upgrade this copy), and then installs rubble on top of that. Then rubble could be used to manage mods.
Does this seem reasonable?