Re: boundary between main and contrib

On Fri, 08 Jan 2021 at 22:31:05 +0100, Stephen Kitt wrote:
> This line of reasoning does fall over somewhat when one considers game
> engines; the rule there in Debian is that if enough game *data* is available
> to provide a featureful game, then the engine goes in main, otherwise it goes
> in contrib. The theoretical possibility of future availability of DFSG-free
> game data doesn’t help. See for example rocksndiamonds.

This sort of thing is quite close to the border between main and
contrib. We have a couple of Quake 1 engines in main, on the justification
that OpenQuartz (which has never been in Debian) was at least at some
point enough to provide a playable Quake-compatible game: not necessarily
a game you would *want* to play, but technically playable. However,
yamagi-quake2 (yquake2) is in contrib, because I'm not aware of anyone
having seriously tried to make a Free game capable of running on a vanilla
Quake 2 engine.

If you particularly wanted to get rocksndiamonds into main, it probably
could be, either by hacking together an uninteresting-but-playable level
or by asserting that it would be possible to make one.

In practice the rule is that if the maintainer thinks a game engine
should be in main, and they can justify that opinion to the ftp team's
satisfaction, then it gets into main.

> Likewise, game-data-packager, of which Simon is one of the main maintainers,
> is in contrib, with the following reasoning:
> 
> > The game-data-packager package is Free Software but cannot be part of
> > Debian. Its purpose is to repack specific non-free and non-distributable
> > data files, so it depends on software (data) outside Debian to function.
> > As a result, it is distributed in the 'contrib' archive area (see Debian
> > Policy §2.2.2 for details).

I think g-d-p is also quite close to the border between main and contrib.
The reason I haven't tried to get it into main is that it only works with
*specific* non-free games - for every game that it handles, it has to be
taught what should be included in that game - and I think that puts it on
the contrib side of the line.

    smcv