[Pkg-pascal-devel] License of several new files in castle-engine

[Michalis Kamburelis]

Paul Gevers wrote:
> Hi Michalis,
>
> I am currently working on packaging castle-engine for Debian. However, I
> found several new files in the package that have no clear license. The
> files I mean are all in examples/library/ios_tester/ios_tester and are
> copyrighted by Jan Adamec, who seems to have helped you with the other
> files in this directory as well. I assume these files are all under the
> same license as castle-game, but could you please confirm this explicitly?

Yes, they are under the same license as the rest of the engine.

As far as I see, most of them (except the ones automatically generated) 
have, below the copyright, our standard notice

   "Castle Game Engine" is free software; see the file COPYING.txt, 
included in this distribution, for details about the copyright.

which is meant to say that they fall under the same license as engine 
(in castle_game_engine/COPYING.txt --- LGPL with static linking exception).

>
> Now fully off topic: I am going to try to build the src/fonts/*.pas
> files containing the fonts from source (in ./data/). It would be nice if
> there would be an appropriate Makefile to do this. I understand I have
> to build the executable needed from the examples directories, right?

Yes. Build castle_game_engine/examples/fonts/texturefont2pascal.lpr 
(e.g. using the 
castle_game_engine/examples/fonts/texturefont2pascal_compile.sh script). 
Put the texturefont2pascal on $PATH, then 
"castle_game_engine/src/fonts/" and run "./mk_fonts.sh".

Hm, but temporarily you will also have to comment out 
"outlinefont2pascal" call from mk_fonts.sh before running. 
outlinefont2pascal is an ancient Windows-only program. In the future 
outline fonts will be probably completely removed from the engine, and 
outlinefont2pascal will be just gone --- I just did not want to break 
the compatibility too suddenly in 5.0.0.

>Do
> you think it would it make sense for Debian to ship those "example"
> executables as castle-engine utilities or is that really overkill?
>

Some of these examples are helpful tools, so it may be useful. 
examples/fonts/texturefont2pascal is one example, some others are image 
utilities in examples/images_videos/ (e.g. 
examples/images_videos/dds_decompose , quite useful for working with 
DDS), and some basic utilities in examples/tools/ .

For me, many of them are useful, even independent of our engine. 
Although I'm biased :)

BTW, future versions of the engine may include a build tool, 
https://sourceforge.net/p/castle-engine/wiki/Planned%3A%20build%20tool/ 
. This would wrap compilation and packaging of the game (together with 
generating some standard project skeleton e.g. for Android). Of course 
using FPC (or Lazarus) directly for compilation would still be possible, 
although it's more and more cumbersome when you try to hide the 
differences between standalone/Android/iOS... At the beginning I thought 
that the build tool could be a simple bash script, but now I'm more and 
more leaning toward making it a real ObjectPascal program (also using 
our engine). Then it will be really desired for Debian to have a 
compiled binary of the build tool packaged together with engine :)

Regards,
Michalis