Hi,

only year later :)

Quoting Johannes Schauer (2013-07-14 19:26:58)
> Petter Reinholdtsen just told me that one of the reasons leocad started
> including a small built-in parts library was to not have a hard dependency on
> the LDraw parts library in Debian and therefore allow its inclusion in Debian
> "main" instead of "contrib".
> 
> The LDraw parts library is licensed under CC-BY 2.0 which is not considered
> to be DFSG free [1]. I recently packaged the LDraw parts library [2] and
> because it is CC-BY 2.0 it must go into Debian "non-free". Once the
> ldraw-parts package is accepted in Debian proper, the leocad package could
> Recommend or Suggest the ldraw-parts package because I heard that a recently
> added feature of leocad was to directly read the LDraw parts library.

Petter Reinholdtsen just uploaded the new version 1401 of the ldraw-parts
package to Debian "non-free":

https://packages.debian.org/sid/ldraw-parts

Can leocad yet make use of the raw ldraw format or must there be some
conversion into its own format beforehand?

If it can make use of the raw ldraw format, then maybe the leocad Debian
package can "Suggest" the ldraw-parts package? (it cannot "Recommend" it
because then leocad cannot be in "main" anymore).

If there has to be some conversion, then this conversion could be done while
building the ldraw-parts package. I have leocad 0.80.2-1 installed and its man
page says that it has the --convert option to read ldraw parts and write out a
leocad pieces library. I could include the result of this conversion into the
ldraw-parts package.

Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to do this conversion as I'm getting:

        Unknown parameter: --convert

What is the problem?

> I also packaged other software including ldglite [3], ldview [4], ldpub and
> lic. They all have a hard dependency on the non-free ldraw-parts package as
> without a parts library they are useless. They can therefore not go into
> "main" but must remain in "contrib" even though they are GPL licensed.
> 
> Now here comes my question: would it be possible to convert the initial
> built-in parts library that ships with leocad into LDraw format? Since leocad
> is in main, I suppose its part library is also released under a DFSG free
> license. If this would be possible, then we could provide a small, limited
> parts library package in Debian which all the above packages could depend
> upon to at least be available in "main" instead of "contrib". Only if one
> would need /all/ parts one would need the "non-free" ldraw-parts package. How
> hard would it be to convert the built-in leocad parts library to LDraw
> format?

In later emails of this thread I showed that I came up with a Python script
which is able to generate basic ldraw parts which are fit for Debian "main":

https://github.com/josch/lego-parts-generator

This Debian bug https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=755437
complains that leocad only ships a minimal pieces library. Maybe this bug can
be resolved by leocad using the 128 parts that the Python script provides? Here
is a more recent montage of all the parts that are generated:

https://mister-muffin.de/p/9reb.png

Feel free to either include the Python script or the parts generated by it into
leocad. I changed the license of the code to MIT/Expat to avoid any possible
problems with respect to licensing.

If you do not think that either the script or the generated parts should go
into leocad itself, then I can package the software for Debian main and the
leocad package can then depend on it.

What do you think?

cheers, josch
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