[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Should sauerbraten-wake6 be part of main?



On 18/02/14 18:16, Markus Koschany wrote:
> And here I beg to differ. The crux of your argument is that you
> restrict the usage of sauerbraten-wake6 and game assets in general
> to one purpose and create the paradoxical situation where you have
> free assets and a free engine and all of them cannot be promoted
> because they are not part of Debian.

You have free assets and the free Sauerbraten engine, but putting them
together does not get you the game Sauerbraten, no more than putting
together the OpenArena data and the ioquake3 engine gets you Quake III
Arena (but it does get you OpenArena).

I don't have any problem with promoting things that are not part of
Debian. Lots of good things are not part of Debian, and some of them
are even Free. Wikipedia content is available under CC-BY-SA-3.0, but
it isn't all in Debian (to the ftpmasters' great relief, I'm sure).

> Even if sauerbraten-wake6 contained hundreds of free images and
> maps, it wouldn't qualify for main either.

If it contained enough content to be a game analogous to OpenArena in
its own right, it could be packaged alongside an engine that can play
it. I think that's fine, as long as it doesn't claim to be
Sauerbraten. I don't know what resource files the Sauerbraten engine
needs in order to be useful: is -wake6 enough, or does it also need
player/weapon graphics or other missing bits?

If there are bits missing that would be necessary to make this
hypothetical Free game based on the Sauerbraten engine run correctly,
then I think the test it fails for inclusion in main is not
"unsuitable licensing" but rather "has a grave bug: doesn't work".

> As I have outlined before the package consists of game assets that
> could be used in different projects, under different circumstances
> and for different purposes.

Right, but that doesn't necessarily mean it should be in a binary
package in main. All the files in src:quake are Free, and you can edit
them with a text editor or Inkscape, or print them out and make them
into a hat[1], or whatever you want; but we still package src:quake in
contrib, because in practice, what it's there for is integrating
non-Free (indeed non-gratis) data with a Free engine.

> Imagine all the other use cases such as educational ones, learning
> to modify images with image manipulation tools and especially
> teaching people how to create free content for the Sauerbraten
> game.

The package you're talking about is sauerbraten-wake6, not
openclipart. I think there's a difference of expectation in what those
packages and their dependencies should support :-)

If what you want is a library of Free content, adding a deb-src (but
not deb) apt source for contrib is fine: everything in contrib is
meant to be Free, just not necessarily useful or installable on its
own. (Hmm, perhaps I should ask the maintainer of
codesearch.debian.net to include contrib, on similar logic?)

Analogously, not everything in src:openarena-data gets into the binary
package: if you want to use OpenArena as a source of free
textures/etc. (to import into Sauerbraten, or otherwise), the source
package is better for the purpose than the binary package.

    S

[1] Not recommended.


Reply to: