Comment 7 for bug 231811

You do need a wad file and prboom is useless without one. I guess you are suggesting that the wad file should be seen as similar to e.g. a JPEG used in conjunction with the GIMP: you don't need to provide a JPEG in a package for GIMP to be in the archive. The difference of course is the GIMP can be used to create a new JPEG from scratch.

With the dependency, people who are not familiar with doom are protected from installing the package and having something that won't work. People who are familiar and own doom can easily build a doom-wad package using doom-package (or game-data-packager). The trouble seems to be that most of the people in this category don't read the prboom package description before installing it (indeed, they seem to blindly hit OK in their package manager enough times to get freedoom downloaded and installed before they notice).

FWIW, I'm the upstream maintainer of the package in Debian.