Re: status of gtkradiant
On Tuesday 05 September 2006 14:06, Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> Hi!
>
> * Frits Daalmans <fritsd@wanadoo.nl> [060827 00:19]:
> > It's been a while since my last RFS and a few days since I asked for
> > upload of
>
> [..]
>
> > Please tell me what you think!
>
> Sorry, took me some time to investigate your package further.
>
> As far as I see you address all issues from my previous mail. Congrats
> on that :)
>
> Sadly I think I found an other problem. If I understood your
> debian/README.debian corectly, for gtkradiant to work you still need to
> download stuff from the internet, right?
> (At least it told me it couldn't find game data, when I just started
> it.)
>
> Therefore it depends on stuff not packages in debian (and if I
> understood that corectly, it curently can't be packaged due to license
> issues), and can't go into main, only contrib :(
>
> Sorry. Shall I upload it there?
Thanks a lot for taking the time to look at it, it's my first package and I'm
happy with any criticism because I've got to learn all this. I was getting a
bit impatient because I think it would be nice if gtkradiant still makes it
into etch.
Yes, contrib sounds good at the moment, I suppose it can always be migrated to
main if it is certain that it's free. Can anyone comment on a (rather long)
rant about whether it's non-free, contrib, or free:
I find your question very difficult, actually, because of the nature of the
package. Because it's an editor, it should be able to be used by a user
to write levels for a new, to be developed, game. All this would take (AFAIK)
is to draw and design new textures, define new entities, and then adding a
configuration files /usr/share/games/gtkradiant/games/mynewgame.game
and /usr/share/games/gtkradiant/mynewgame.game/data/entities.def etc.
So in that sense I think the program is free and fully functional and can go
in main.
However, for any normal user not about to design their own entire game but
only wanting to write nexuiz or quake4 levels, this normal usage of the
program depends on existing configuration files and textures. The textures
and artwork are either free (nexuiz-data) or not (commercial quake4 DVD).,
but the configuration files are currently UNKNOWN.
They can be downloaded freely from
https://zerowing.idsoftware.com/svn/radiant.gamepacks
BUT I didn't find a seperate copyright file there (I only looked in Q4Pack and
NexuizPack). As I understand it, these configuration files are therefore at
the moment non-free until someone from the Id company can put a copyright
file there.
I wrote an e-mail to Id software (well.. I think it was someone from Id
software, called SpOg) asking if they could please clarify what the
copyright license is on those gamepacks but I didn't get a reply yet.
In the meantime, we could write debian packages like java-package or this
recent effort by Gonéri Le Bouder so that an end-user can load and install
non-redistributable gtkradiant-data-nexuizpack and gtkradiant-data-q4pack
and gtkradiant-doc (the Q3Rad_Manual webpage, quite important because
I found gtkradiant not easy to use).
For this, it would be nice if "mknonfreepkg" would have to be able to pull in
an svn-over-https repository because it's not stored as a tarball upstream.
Summary: I agree 100% on contrib for the time being (pity though).
>
>
> Yours sincerely,
> Alexander
Yours sincerely,
Frits
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