Re: RFS: 0ad

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Scott Howard <showard314@gmail.com> writes:

> - As for inclusion in Debian: 0AD has some bundled library issues
> (e.g. fcollada). The fcollada issue has been mentioned on this list
> [1-2]. Basically fcollada was a library created by a company 10 years
> ago with a GPL license. Since then the company stopped maintaining it
> and removed it from their website. Many projects grabbed the latest
> release and forked it for their own needs. There are at least 4 major
> forks out there which are all hacked for individual projects (there are
> many other patched versions, but it's hard to keep track). I tried to
> merge all of the major changes together in a way that each project can
> use, but each fcollada library is pretty much an independent project now
> where significant work will be needed to get a single library that
> everyone can use. Debian requires one canonical library, and right now
> the only practical solution would be to have packages for each of the
> major forks (which over the past 10 years have grown incompatible with
> each other), but I don't think that is allowed.

Debian doesn't *require* a single canonical library.  It's just strongly
preferred for security support.  In this case, it sounds like what was
originally one library has forked thoroughly enough to be four separate
libraries.  It's not an ideal situation, but I don't think this should
block adding the software to Debian.

That said, it would still be nice to fix the embedding of yet another gzip
library.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>