Re: doomsday not DFSG (was Re: ITP: doomsday - greatly improved engine to play doom, doom2, heretic and hexen)
I've added the original ITPer to the CC list, as he hasn't contributed
to this thread (and so I don't know if he reads -devel).
Alexander, your ITP has generated a bit of discussion: see
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/07/thrd3.html#01170>.
On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 03:08:06PM +1000, Jamie Jones wrote:
> After sleeping on it, yes hijack does seem a bit strong, but after a bad
> day, then downloading my mail to see an ITP on a package that has been
> kept out for a reason, I felt rather unhappy.
I can certainly appreciate that.
> Doomsday (or Deng as upstream and I refer to it) is the cleanest
> implementation in regards separation of the different game logic and
> features. The plugins are basically .so files, so if you want to play
> doom, you load the jdoom plugin, you want hexen, you load the jhexen
> plugin.
That's true. The heretic/hexen licence terms are so strict as to make
even this dodgy, but if the code was excluded from Debian, it wouldn't
be Debian's problem. I expect this confusion would have been avoided if
the upstream author didn't classify the entirety of the code as GPL in
sourceforge.net.
> The problem with legacy and the other ports mentioned is that this logic
> wasn't separated so that they could function without the raven code.
Yes I know :( I've tried to persuade the upstream maintainers but it has
unfortunately been to no avail. The legacy maintainers are some of the
most polite, however: I received some pretty angry mail from some of the
others.
> The biggest problem is that many new wads (game levels) support hexen
> features in a doom wad (I believe that they call this zdoom format).
> By supporting zdoom format and not using a plugin they then fail the
> DFSG test with regards to the raven code.
I only know of Zdoom that uses this different WAD structure (maybe
vavoom does too, not too familiar with that port). However, zdoom
implemented that *before* the heretic/hexen source code release. Despite
this, I think that there is no interest in relicencing under the GPL in
the zdoom camp.
> Deng doesn't even support Boom format (an extension to the GPL Doom
> wad format) that was the cause for a fork some time ago.
Yup Risen3D - which is closed source :-( I understand that there is work
on putting boom support into Jdoom now - about time! (as an upstream
author of freedoom, I've had to field many questions about jdoom and
boom over the years)
--
Jon Dowland
http://jon.dowland.name/
PGP fingerprint: 7032F238
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