Re: Red Eclipse "missing sources"?
On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 6:05 AM, Martin Erik Werner
<martinerikwerner@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-12-14 at 21:39 +0100, Guest One wrote:
>> In this bug http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=651752 i read:
>>
>> "This package contains the data content, e.g. maps, models, textures, sounds,
>> etc. for Red Eclipse
>>
>> This will go in non-free due to missing "sources" (and not due to licensing)."
>>
>> Can you tell me which sources?
>>
>>
>
> (I packaged Red Eclipse for Debian)
>
> If you read the DFSG to also require "source" for all media content (and
> most people in Debian do), it implies that for example images created
> via GIMP would need to have the original xcf-files available, models
> created in Blender would need to have the original blend-files, music
> created by combining samples in audacity would need to have the original
> samples available, and the corresponding audacity project file, etc.
>
> I've guesstimated that for Red Eclipse, it might be possible to get the
> "source" for maybe 30% of the media content, with considerable effort
> and time spent. I felt that it would not be a particularly useful
> exercise, and decided not to do so.
>
> Hence why redeclipse-data is non-free.
>
> Now it should be noted that some games that are already in Debian would
> fail this test, so it seems that the strictness of this has increased
> lately, and is not normally being applied to already-in-Debian games.
> There's also an impression that the FTP masters might be a bit less
> strict than the above interpretation, so it's a bit of a grey area, from
> what I have gathered.
>
> It's also a subject which has been discussed to death without (in my
> opinion) a clear consensus.
>
> For Red Eclipse, I've taken the best/worst case scenario (depending on
> your side) and called it non-free.
>
> --
> Martin Erik Werner <martinerikwerner@gmail.com>
Just wanted to throw my 2 bits in...
IANADD, and thus had to depend on a number of DD's to sponsor the
various packages I maintain. What I've seen so far is a discrepancy
between what the DFSG explicitly requires (and the spirit of which the
DFSG is written in), i.e. how "source" is interpreted by the DD's that
have sponsored my packages. We can all agree that source code has to
be included for packages in main, and that binaries need to be
compiled from said source, but that's about all we can agree on (in
terms of what is defined as "source"). Some of the DD's I've worked
with are satisfied as long as the above condition holds true; others
define "source" a bit (or a lot) more broadly, and what needs to be
built/compiled/generated at build time depends on what you consider to
be "source". i.e. I've had sponsors of mine ask for HTML/PDF docs to
be regenerated, for images/complex models to be rebuilt, for
pre-compiled/generated headers in the source code to be regenerated,
or for some combination of the above, etc. This is something that has
irked me for a long time, and I do wish that Policy/DFSG could be more
explicit about the requirements, but I think everybody on this list
already knows that even if this issue were brought to debian-devel,
there would a long discussion about this, but it would be inconclusive
and no consensus would be reached.
So in summary...contrary to what you'd expect, packages that are
suitable for main is not defined by what's in the DFSG or Policy, but
by 2 other things instead:
- how your sponsor DD defines "source"
- whether or not the ftpmasters find the above definition acceptable
(I was going to include my own definition above, but then I realized
that nobody would actually care, and I have better things to do than
to rant about the status quo.)
Regards,
Vincent
Reply to: