[Debian-lego-team] NQC packaging and upstream change

[Matthew Sheets]

Hello Nicolas,

> Thank you for your archival work this is really a needed effort as
> everything disappear so fast.

I am grateful to hear it is appreciated—it became no small undertaking.  :-)

> > It appears you found the assembly source for fastdl.srec.  :-)
> I will propose an MR to add it and include it as an optional step in the
> build if you like.

I think that would be good, thank you.  I might suggest even making it a regular step.  One problem encountered over the years is that code that used to compile using a given version of tools will start to fail as tools update, and being a regular step should help ensure anything like that is caught in a more timely manner.  Something like this happened with BrickEmu not too long ago, only the build was succeeding but is was crashing during the test run.  Tried switching to one of the older Ubutu runners for GitHub Actions, and it the CI action succeeded.  Worked with another user to ultimately trace it down to stricter rules the latest GCC on Ubutu-latest was enforcing.


This will probably be for some future release, but there is a small collection of NQC "libs" (*.nqh files) and other docs and guides under the NQC-libs repository.  It might make sense to organize things a little better, merge it into the main NQC repository, and ship the libs with NQC itself.  They were collected from various sources outside the original NQC project but have licenses such as MPL, GPL, and Unlicense.
 - https://github.com/BrickBot/nqc-libs/


Thank you,
Matthew

________________________________________
From: Nicolas Schodet <nico at ni.fr.eu.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2025 6:19 PM
To: Matthew Sheets <mesheets at hotmail.com>
Cc: Debian LEGO Team <debian-lego-team at lists.alioth.debian.org>
Subject: Re: [Debian-lego-team] NQC packaging and upstream change
 
Hello Matthew,

* Matthew Sheets <mesheets at hotmail.com> [2025-04-26 20:02]:
> > I will have to exclude the firmware directory as this is definitely
> > not free software.
> I have deleted this folder, as those firmware files have been
> available elsewhere under the BrickBot organization and no longer need
> to be retained under the NQC project.  As RCX-related content began
> disappearing, I started saving things and did not have everything
> organized as robustly at the beginning (more just trying to grab
> things before they disappeared).  I updated the main README.md files
> to include links to those LEGO and Dick Swan "fast" firmwares.
>  - https://brickbot.github.io/Firmware.html

Thank you for your archival work this is really a needed effort as
everything disappear so fast.

> > I also do not have the licensing term for the doc/*.pdf files
> > neither the sources
> The documentation resources, including NQC_Guide.pdf, NQC_Manual.pdf,
> plus NQC_Tutorial.pdf and associated samples currently under
> BrickBot/NQC-libs, are all from the original SourceForge NQC site that
> released the software under the MPL.  Does this provide sufficient
> correlation?
>  - https://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc/

Actually, I do not think this is sufficient to declare it uses the same
licence. Moreover, it would need to be released in source form. May be
you can ask John for the source.

> It appears you found the assembly source for fastdl.srec.  :-)

I will propose an MR to add it and include it as an optional step in the
build if you like.

> > I opened an MR[1] importing patches from the debian packaging.
> Thank you for the pull request!  The CI build passed, and it otherwise
> looked fine to me, so I've merged it.  Additionally, I've also updated
> the Makefile, updated the ChangeLog, and applied the new versioning
> scheme.  Of particular note for packaging is that Makefile updates
> include adoption more common installation variables, such as prefix,
> exec_prefix, bindir, datarootdir, mandir, man1dir, etc., which
> hopefully should help make packaging easier in the long run.

> A new NQC 4.0.0 release is now available
>  - https://github.com/BrickBot/nqc/releases/tag/v4.0.0

Thanks!

Nicolas.