On Sat, Dec 22, 2001 at 07:42:03AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 11:57:21PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > > If the only practical use of the engine is to run non-free levels from > > id, then it belongs in contrib. > > But that's obviously not the case. A game engine, especially one coded > in large part by a luminary in the fieldlike John Carmack, is > interesting and useful (to programmers) in its own right. > > We wouldn't stick a Free compiler or interpreter for some new-fangled > programming language in contrib simply because no Free programs written > in that language were yet packaged for Debian. > > I would, however, be tempted to mark such an engine as Priority extra > until Free game levels were packaged for Debian, so that Debian's many > non-programming users would not get their hopes up at being able to play > the game in Debian as distributed.
How about the fact that the engine requires the game data to run, meaning it needs a Depends: quake2-data. Without such data it shouldn't be packaged at all. No, I wouldn't stick a new compiler/interpreter in contrib. But I wouldn't package it at all either, unless I was either going to package a program that used it, or I had some local program that used it. And in the case of an interpreter, you could use it interactively. -- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus
