Re: Quake 2 sources GPL'd

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Dale Scheetz wrote:
> I'm willing to accept the quake2-engine in non-us as long as it is
> available somewhere with a maintainer to bounce issues off of. I suspect
> that myself and Ben excluded everyone else will accept it going into
> contrib...

I think Dale's hit the nail on the head with his post. The issues
keeping quake 2 out of main, granting Ben's insistence that it can be
looked at as an engine for games, are:

  * As an engine for games, it is woefully lacking in documentation.
    Programming languages have at least one of a spec, sample code, a
    body of existing code, or something to read to learn them, while this
    "engine" does not.
    
  * Nobody has actually come forward and volenteered to put this in main
    and give it the level of mantainance software in main deserves. If
    it were in main, they would really be obligated to be able to tell
    users some way it can be used, whether that is pointing them as a
    game that uses it, or at some documentation for writing one or at a
    free level editor or whatever. But if all the maintainer can do is 
    point the user at data files you buy on CD, it makes a mockery of it
    being in main.

So in summary we may have actually excluded a package from being in main
because it lacks sufficient documentation (nice precedent ;-), and this
can all be changed by one maintainer with sufficient chutzpah to upload
it to main and deal with the consequences.

Anyway, my 2¢: If you don't like contrib, putting it in experimental/main
would probably serve the above points just as well.

-- 
see shy jo, who is currently uploading to main a library that is not used
            by any currently released free software, but which he expects
	    will be entirely noncontroversial as software in main