[Pkg-pascal-devel] Castle Game Engine 6.0 release in Debian

[Michalis Kamburelis]

 "2017-03-27 21:56 GMT+02:00 Paul Gevers <elbrus at debian.org>:
> Your generate-code target requires your file-to-pascal-string utility.
> Is is worth shipping that with castle-game-engine? Or is it really to
> trivial and should I included in view3dscene?

file_to_pascal_string is part of PasDoc. The next PasDoc version will
include such tools in the binary distribution. The Debian's "pasdoc"
package could also provide file_to_pascal_string in /usr/bin/ (no need
to wait for the next PasDoc release, the source code of
file_to_pascal_string is already in last released PasDoc sources).

- So, if you'd like to do it "properly", then I would suggest to make
"file_to_pascal_string" available in the "pasdoc" package (along with
pascal_pre_proc, and file_to_pascal_data tools). Then view3dscene
could just build-depend on pasdoc.

- A simpler way is to indeed just package file_to_pascal_string code
along with view3dscene, at least for now. It's quite trivial. The only
file you need is this:
https://github.com/pasdoc/pasdoc/blob/master/source/tools/file_to_pascal_string.dpr
, compile just by "fpc file_to_pascal_string.dpr". It's available on
GPL >= 2 license, exactly as view3dscene source code, so it's legally
simple.

>
> The make target in images depends on image2pascal, while
> castle-game-engine now ships image-to-pascal. Trivial patch attached.

Thank you, applied!

>
> Lintian tells me this:
> I: view3dscene: desktop-entry-lacks-keywords-entry
> usr/share/applications/view3dscene.desktop
> N:
> N:    This .desktop file does either not contain a "Keywords" entry or
> it does
> N:    not contain any keywords not already present in the "Name" or
> N:    "GenericName" entries.

Thanks, I adeed keywords:
https://github.com/castle-engine/view3dscene/commit/95a10a51cd4d37faddf22d4761f91b2306ed62fe

> One last thing. I noticed a file in macosx folder that I don't trust.
> Could you please explain the content, license and source of
> macosx/template.dmg.bz2?
>

It is used for releasing view3dscene on Mac OS X.

The .dmg is an archive format popular on Mac OS X, it's name comes
from "disk image", it can be unpacked or mounted (as a disk) on Mac OS
X. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Disk_Image . We
additionally compress it by bz2, because the compression of dmg itself
was poor (testing now: for some reason, "template.dmg" has 40M, while
the data inside has  25M... not really sure why).

You can unpack it on Linux by

  bunzip2 template.dmg.bz2
  7z x template.dmg

(see http://askubuntu.com/questions/38112/how-can-i-open-a-dmg-file )

Inside, it contains a configuration to show the directory inside the
archive nicely, when on Mac OS X:

- With a simple gradient background, that I created in GIMP by editing
a screenshot from view3dscene
https://castle-engine.sourceforge.io/images/original_size/castle_sunset.png

- And with a symlink so that users can easily drag "view3dscene" icon
to the "Applications" folder, which is a common installation method
known to Mac OS X users.

This was created by configuring the folder display in Mac OS X
"Finder", and then packaging this folder using Mac OS X dmg tool
("hdiutil", as far as I remember, or maybe some GUI alternative).

It is used by the pack_macosx.sh script, that in turn uses the
create_macosx_bundle.sh script from
https://github.com/castle-engine/cge-scripts , which in turn calls
some command-line tools on Mac OS X. When we release view3dscene on
Mac OS X, we use pack_macosx.sh to insert a new "view3dscene" and
"tovrmlx3d" binaries into the "template.dmg".

This was all created by me, using only my own data. However, I'm not
aware of any software on Linux that allows to easily modify it. I
mean, you could probably find something that can create dmg files. But
I don't think that you can find something that can edit the "magic"
files inside that tell Mac OS X "Finder" how to display this folder.
As far as I know, these are organized in some "Finder" proprietary
format.

Summary:
- it's all mine, and can be treated as covered by the GPL >= 2 license
(like the rest of view3dscene)
- but the program to actually edit this data ("Finder") is
proprietary, and only on Mac OS X, and I don't think there is any
alternative to it.

If needed, you can simply remove it from sources. It's of course not
needed on Linux.

Regards,
Michalis