Bug#551000: ITP: sandbox -- Collaborative 3D game editor for education
Update and info:
m.d.n: http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/sponsor-pkglist?action=details;package=sandboxgamemaker
http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/non-free/s/sandboxgamemaker/sandboxgamemaker_2.4-2.dsc
Ubuntu Karmic PPA: https://launchpad.net/~showard314/+archive/ppa
bzr branch for packaging (I have an alioth account but I haven't been
added to the games team):
https://code.launchpad.net/~showard314/sandboxgamemaker-debian/trunk
- I'm a GNOME developer (gnome-power-manager) and member of the Ubuntu
MOTU science team. I want to get involved with Debian maintenance, and
this is my first totally new package. Although this is a new package,
I'm actually more interested in maintaining existing ones than adding
new ones and have done some new version upgrades through debdiffs and
bug reports.
- I received an email about this program (Sandbox Game Maker), and
found the whole project intriguing. Upstream really wants an official
linux package for this so I helped them by making it. This was
attempted once before (sandbox-lite), but it never got uploaded.
Sandbox-lite was entirely DFSG, but I think upstream stopped
developing it since users were mostly contributing non-free content
and the Debian packager didn't finish. I contacted the debian packager
of sandbox-lite and asked if she'd want either my help to finish hers
or her help on mine, but she declined either - so I started from
scratch using the most recent Sandbox release, which is non-free (see
below).
- This builds two binaries: an architecture dependent game engine, and
architecture independent content and game data. The engine depends on
the data.
- Licenses: The original game engine, networking library, and "movie"
engine are all DFSG. The modifications on the game engine are not DFSG
as of now. The upstream authors wrote their own custom license which
doesn't do what they want it to do, so I'm actually working with them
to make their whole project GPLv3 so that the content generated from
their project will also be GPLv3. However, right not, this release is
non-free. The content is created by users (models, etc), and is a
combination of non-free (CC-BY-SA-NC) and free. I tried to remove all
non-free content, but the game is pretty much unplayable with out it.
I think the long term plan would be to make the game engine free
(GPLv3) in contrib, and the content in non-free.
- Static linked library: This package includes the enet library, and
compiles and statically links it. This is because they use enet from
SVN; what we have in debian isn't new enough. Later versions of
sandboxgamemaker in Debian can use the shared library for security
reasons once enet releases the version in their SVN and we get that in
Debian.
- Patches:
a) their makefile had a typo which I corrected and they have included
that change upstream. This typo affects the clean target, so I have to
patch the Makefile to clean and then unpatch it.
b) I changed the install location to the proper one in Debian.
c) The enet library uses autotools to create a configure file, but the
Makefile for sandboxgamemaker does not recreate the configure file
when you build (you are stuck with their "old" configure file).I
patched their makefile to create a new configure file during build,
and to clean up all that extra stuff during clean. (Thanks to lintian
for pointing that out!)
- my get-orig-source target downloads their zip file, deletes windows
binaries and .dlls, and cleans up the makefile/autotools problem I
described above.
- watch file: they don't actually have an easy way of finding their
downloads. They post releases on a blog, but the blog doesn't actually
link to the download but to a PHP script that has a code number in it
which is then converted to a download file. They do this because they
have a counter running to have a feel about how many people download
their program.
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