Re: welcome to the games team Michael Dorrington!
Hi Michael and Markus,
On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 09:47:17PM +0100, Markus Koschany wrote:
> On 31.10.2014 09:29, Michael Dorrington wrote:
> > I would like to help with packaging Xonotic for Debian:
> > https://wiki.debian.org/Games/Suggested#Xonotic
>
> David Bate and Simon McVittie did some initial work on it but this game
> definitely needs a dedicated maintainer. I would also contribute to the
> packaging if there was a real driver.
Yes, I have been very dormant on this lately. Sorry about this.
It would be great to great to have a new effort to package Xonotic. I
am perfectly happy keeping darkplaces (the engine that Xonotic uses) up
to date and also other pieces of the puzzle or organising the general
direction - but everything together was overwhelming for me.
The problem is that I went too far down the rabbit hole...
Packaging the data for Xonotic (from source) is fairly easy for the most
part: the upstream build system uses a single script that compiles the
images. Invoking this through find should be enough.
The problem is with maps. Upstream maintains the netradiant level
editor:
http://git.xonotic.org/?p=xonotic/netradiant.git
and it includes a map compiler q3map2. I initially looked at packaging
this but the licensing of many files is in a bad state. For example
there are GPL 2+ files that are also under a limited use license from ID
software. This license is not included in the source, but searching
online for possible candidates reveals that it is not GPL compatible.
However, a similar project, GtkRadiant, is maintained by a former
employee of ID software and it contains the same files but the
references to the ID License have been removed, so maybe permission was
granted to remove them. This would need investigation.
I have to admit, I got to this point and gave up. I think that it would
require some serious effort to make this ready for Debian. I believe
that there were other license issues too. If someone would like to try
packaging it I can write up my findings in a more helpful way.
Looking forward, if we want to get Xonotic into Debian (which I think
would be excellent) we have to solve this problem. I can see a few
possible solutions, maybe other members of the team can think of others:
* We actually package netradiant (seems difficult).
* We may be able to use a different Quake map compiler that is in a
better shape, for example ufo-radiant or get GtkRadiant to compile
Xonotic maps (if GtkRadiant is in a better shape). I do not know of
the chances that this will work, but it may be worth investigating to
save us duplicated effort.
* We package the maps (and maybe other assets) that are compiled by
upstream. Of course, this is not the most desirable solution, but
something is better than nothing. This is how the data for Nexuiz is
packaged. I am not sure if Debian's opinion on doing this changes
under the condition that there does/may not *exist* a compiler
suitable for Debian (rather than it not being *packaged* for Debian, as
I believe was the understanding for Nexuiz).
Are there any opinions on this? I hope that we can get something
working.
David
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