On Fri, 04 Nov 2011 at 10:40:52 +0100, Didier Raboud wrote:
> Devid filed this ITP ~2 weeks ago, and closed it some hours later. Now,
> looking around for 3D FPS available for Debian, I fell on the Xonotic
> project,
> and then on this ITP. So now I wonder: given the situation of Nexuiz (and its
> Xonotic fork), are there some plans to provide Xonotic as a successor of
> Nexuiz in Debian or will it (if it will) be packaged separately?
My only interest in Nexuiz is that it's another user of the Darkplaces
(enhanced Quake 1) engine. I uploaded a version of Nexuiz without its own
engine to reduce our embedded-code-copies technical debt.
I don't plan to package Xonotic myself (I'm trying to avoid ending up
in the Uploaders of any more games I don't actually play...), but if
someone else wants to package it, I'd be happy to help out from the
darkplaces angle.
Now that Xonotic has a non-alpha release, it's probably suitable for
packaging. I think the packaging should be "the same shape as" nexuiz -
a wrapper around the darkplaces engine (which I believe is shared between
Quake 1, Nexuiz Classic, Xonotic and others without needing per-game patches).
To avoid trademark infringement or misleading our users, it should be
packaged under the name "xonotic". (Our Nexuiz Classic packages are fine
under the name "nexuiz", IMO, because that was the name of the game when it
was released - but that justification doesn't apply to Xonotic.)
Beware that for GPL and Policy compliance, a prospective maintainer might
need to rebuild the game logic from source, which may require packaging a
QuakeC compiler. I believe there's at least one Free QuakeC compiler.
Nexuiz Classic's game logic is in nexuiz-data; it's entirely possible that
it's packaged in a non-GPL-compliant and/or not-built-from-source way,
like OpenArena used to be. I haven't researched it.
Hopefully Darkplaces doesn't have a "pure server" mechanism. If it does,
then rebuilding the game logic while retaining network compatibility requires
circumventing that mechanism, like I did for OpenArena. Don't expect upstream
to help you with this - if they're anything like ioquake3/openarena upstream,
they'll probably consider it to be a form of cheating.
I think whether Nexuiz Classic should be removed from the archive should be
decided on its own merits. The facts are that it's a dead-upstream game,
running on an upstream-maintained engine that we want in the archive
anyway (for Xonotic and (non-free) Quake 1). As long as it isn't a burden
and has users, we might as well keep it; but if it becomes a burden, then
it needs either an active maintainer looking after it, or removal.
If Nexuiz Classic was removed from the archive, Xonotic could in principle
provide transitional packages, but I'm inclined to say it still shouldn't -
I'm inclined to think of Xonotic as a sequel to Nexuiz Classic, rather
than a replacement (think Doom vs. Doom II - which also had the same engine,
give or take).
S
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