Re: Quake 2 sources GPL'd
On Sat, Dec 22, 2001 at 07:42:03AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 11:57:21PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> > If the only practical use of the engine is to run non-free levels from
> > id, then it belongs in contrib.
>
> But that's obviously not the case. A game engine, especially one coded
> in large part by a luminary in the fieldlike John Carmack, is
> interesting and useful (to programmers) in its own right.
>
> We wouldn't stick a Free compiler or interpreter for some new-fangled
> programming language in contrib simply because no Free programs written
> in that language were yet packaged for Debian.
>
> I would, however, be tempted to mark such an engine as Priority extra
> until Free game levels were packaged for Debian, so that Debian's many
> non-programming users would not get their hopes up at being able to play
> the game in Debian as distributed.
How about the fact that the engine requires the game data to run,
meaning it needs a Depends: quake2-data. Without such data it
shouldn't be packaged at all.
No, I wouldn't stick a new compiler/interpreter in contrib. But I
wouldn't package it at all either, unless I was either going to
package a program that used it, or I had some local program that used
it. And in the case of an interpreter, you could use it
interactively.
--
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus
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