[Savannah-register-public] [task #10974] Submission of Slipstream

[Dimitris Papavasiliou]

Follow-up Comment #4, task #10974 (project administration):

> Then please do so, add them to the tarball and update the tarball.
>
> It seems you're confused with a case of circular reasoning:
>
> * The files are not useful because they're in a Techne-specific
>  format.
>
> * Publishing the Techne-specific format (Rather or in addition to
>  source code) is justified because these files are not useful
>
> Again, access to the source code is a precondition for free software.
> By denying the source code we deny the user some of his rights, please
> see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html.  Whether the files
> are "temporary" or someone (I.g. You or me) consider/don't consider
> them "generally useful" is irrelevant to the issue.

I have to admit that my wording has not been particularly effective on this
matter.  The reason I do not consider these media to be of use to anyone is
because I'm not satisfied with their quality and this is the reason why I have
not released them in a more usable format.  I have written a lot of code until
now for example but have not released all of it as free software simply
because I did not consider it worthy of doing so.  This is perhaps a mistake
on my part but I'm not sure it would be beneficial to the goals of free
software if the body of available free software was to be littered with
countless pieces of trivial code with no use.  This is a theoretical argument
and not entirely relevant to the situation at hand but I'm mentioning it
because it is an interesting aspect that I may not have given the proper
thought.

And now on the topic, my initial idea was to release these temporary media in
the form they're now which although not easily usable is usable nevertheless. 
If proper media was to be constructed either by myself or by someone else
these would then be distributed in proper form and in the proper place.  For
instance I would consider it more useful to post the art in a site such as
www.opengameart.org where it would be accesible to many more potentially
interested parties.  Nevertheless I have to admit that you have a point. 
While I do not deny the user any rights either on purpose or by mistake I do
not make it as easy as possible for him/her to excersise some of them.  This
is a matter of some importance too I suppose.

I do not consider it a good idea to distribute the original media files in the
data tarball though.  It would simply add a lot of redundant data (in the
sense that both the Lua script and a png image are totally equivalent,
containing the same information) that would be of no use the the game itself. 
In my opinion the data tarball should contain the files needed in order for
the game to run and nothing more.  There should be a way to get the original
media for the ones who need them.  So there are two options:

a) Distribute another tarball with the original files.
b) Distribute a script with the data tarball that would allow anyone whishing
to do so to convert the lua scripts back into usable files easy to import into
Blender or the GIMP for instance.

I would find the second approach preferable because it would reduce the
bookkeeping and packaging effort on my part for each new release and it would
also minimize the wasted diskspace and bandwidth on your part.  The script(s)
would be advertised in the README file of course and would only depend on free
software, that is Lua and/or Techne, that would already be installed without
imposing additional dependencies.

Let me know what you think.

Dimitris

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