[Debian-med-packaging] Please help building psychtoolbox-3 on loongarch

[Étienne Mollier]

Hi all,

From Santiago Vila <sanvila at debian.org>, on Wed Jun 3 14:47:51 BST 2026:
> On Wed, Jun 03, 2026 at 03:07:54PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
>> I just see two options:
>> 
>>    1. Live with one of the two solitions (remove -lLexActivator or the
>>       minimal patch from Santiago) or

I see a change from Karsten Schöke is merged in order to
implement option one.

>>    2. Do not provide the package for loong64 (which probably causes no
>>       harm in practice)
> 
> I see a third option:
> 
> 3. Check if the program is really DFSG-free when built on amd64 or arm64.

LexActivator is absent from buildd logs for at least amd64 and
arm64 (and riscv64).  Therefore it should not be intereferring
in binaries, from a licensing perspective.  It looks absent from
the +dfsg source code anyway, which is causing the build failure
in loong64 and sparc64 in the first place.

> There is a macro called PSYCH_NOLM, where LM stands for "License Management",
> and I see it used like this in PsychSourceGL/Source/Linux/Base/PsychPlatform.h:
> 
> 
> #if !defined(__aarch64__) && !defined(__x86_64__)
> #define PSYCH_NOLM
> 
> 
> Maybe a fully DFSG-compliant package, one which does not have to be
> moved to contrib, would need this macro to be always defined.
> 
> But I don't know the package to tell.

This is a complicated package indeed.  I have examined closely
the licensing terms and existing d/copyright.  Upstream source
code has contributed files that are scattered and optional.
Sometimes they are non-free.  The situation is currently dealt
with by repacking +dfsg with a lot of Files-Excluded.

About the license management, I identified that it looks to stem
to a (former) commercial support service proposed upstream.
Apparently the service did not encounter the necessary
commercial success to be viable.  It is being sunset.  Details
are in the header of:

	Psychtoolbox/PsychDocumentation/PsychPaidSupportAndServices.m

I identified that while doing a quick copyright review in order
to ensure that there were no limitating terms, limitations
against commercial uses for instance.  Maybe a more involved
review could be in order, in order to rule out further doubts.

In hope this clarifies things,
Have a nice day,  :)
-- 
  .''`.  Étienne Mollier <emollier at debian.org>
 : :' :  pgp: 8f91 b227 c7d6 f2b1 948c  8236 793c f67e 8f0d 11da
 `. `'   sent from /dev/pts/2, please excuse my verbosity
   `-
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