optional game music files

[Andreas Thienemann]

On Mon, 1 May 2006, Ville Skyttä wrote:

> IMO 12 hours is much too little time for doing something which appears
> to be directly against the packaging guidelines, especially considering
> that today is a holiday in lots of countries and probably considerably
> less people than usual are reading their FE mail.  Patience, please.
+1
 
> I'm not saying that this case is not acceptable for inclusion, but it
> sounds somewhat like being against the intended purpose or the "spirit"
> of that rule.
Nah. I don't think so.
I'm reading the rules, specifically the spirit of the rules, as "don't 
package if you have to get the sounds from a third party fansite but 
package, if they belong to the game".
Belonging to the game is clearly if the music is available from the same 
place as the source is.

Example: I'm packaging vegastrike, an action space flight simulator, for 
fedora. Upstream doesn't offer tarballs, but advises to get the tagged 
files from cvs.
To get the full gaming experience, one has to checkout "vegastrike", 
"data4.x" and "music".

Acting by the letter of the ruling, the music must not be packaged, as 
it's not included with the sources.
But considering that the music files are GPL licensed .ogg files (and even
have a different license stating that the files are Creative Common
licensed for distribution without the game), residing in the same cvs
server as the source and the data files, I'd argue that including the
music as an own rpm should be permissible by the current Guidelines.

> I guess it depends on exactly how optional those files are, how easy it
> is to properly install/remove them without them being rpm-packaged, and
> whether anyone would have any complaints about their inclusion if they'd
> be part of the upstream tarball which also contains the actual game.
Usually the music is always optional.
The games I've seen sofar even allow you to put in your own music.
You can't make it any more optional. ;)
But still, the should be offered as part of the "full" game.
 
NB: I'd defintly argue against packaging MP3 music, which some games 
offer.
But ogg should be okay, as the necessary support is included in core.

bye,
 andreas