Hi folks, i'm in the process of reviving LGeneral and want to adopt it and maintain it as part of the Debian Games Team. [1] My e-mail is about gathering feedback for my package which i have uploaded to mentors.debian.net [2] and seeking advice how i should proceed. I have also created a wiki page for LGeneral.[3] The current situation ===================== The current version of LGeneral shipped with Debian was released in 2004. The package has been orphaned since 2008 and the last QA Upload was in 2009. Unfortunately lgc-pg, a tool to convert game data for LGeneral, was removed in 2011 and nobody saw the connection between lgc-pg and LGeneral. [4] So there is no way to obtain game data within Debian at the moment. In combination with an eight year old version, this renders the package unusable in my opinion. Another issue are bkgnd.bmp and brief_frame.bmp which seem to be part of the non-free game data and have to be removed. LGeneral 1.2.3 ============== My new package builds two binaries: lgeneral and lgc-pg. In total there are sources for * lgeneral * lgc-pg * lgeneral-redit * lged * shptool * ltrextract The author of LGeneral has confirmed to me via private e-mail that he considers lgeneral-redit to be obsolete nowadays. Furthermore it doesn't build and seems to expect GTK-1 as a dependency. The tool is intended for manipulating the conversion process between the original Panzer General game data files and LGeneral's native file format. The other programs are command line tools which basically do the same job. I think having the source code is nice but actually you don't really need them. Hence i don't intend to package lged, shptool and ltrextract. Non-free files ============== My main problem are the files in /usr/share/games/lgeneral/convdata for which lgc-pg depends on to convert the non-free game data. I think the files have to be removed from the source package because they belong to Panzer General. The question is whether it is possible to use the game-data-packager to download these files and to install them into the aforementioned directory, then downloading the pg-data.tar.gz archive, running lgc-pc and eventually building a debian package or better two. It is important to install the convdata before running lgc-pg because otherwise it won't work. What would be the best approach in this situation? intl directory ============== LGeneral ships an embedded copy of GNU gettext. Should i keep it and don't bother or better remove it and patch the Make files? Free Data ========= I've also checked the status of replacement files [5] which are available at [6]. With these files i could create a standalone game but unfortunately the archives don't contain any information about copyright and licenses. The author of LGeneral confirmed to me that those files were submitted by various volunteers but he can't remember who they are. I'm collecting links to potential sources for free game data at the wiki. Thanks for reading this far. I'm glad about any help, suggestions and testing. Regards Markus [1] http://bugs.debian.org/465942 [2] https://mentors.debian.net/package/lgeneral [3] http://wiki.debian.org/Games/LGeneral [4] http://bugs.debian.org/465943 [5] http://bugs.debian.org/193061 [6] http://lgames.sourceforge.net/index.php?project=LGeneral&sub=Scenarios
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