[arch-dev-public] Adding {lib32-}libtxc_dxtn_s2tc in community/multilib

[Sven-Hendrik Haase]

On 17.12.2012 01:53, Jan Steffens wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Laurent Carlier <lordheavym at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "S2TC is a patent-free S3TC compatible implementation and provides
>>  texture compression to Mesa. The package also includes tools to
>>  compress/decompress S2TC textures and convert S3TC textures to
>>  S2TC ones using the patent-free algorithm."
>>
>> Plan is to add these packages in community/multilib. These packages are patent
>> free S3TC implementation instead of libtxc_dxtn. These are already part of
>> Ubuntu and Debian.
>>
>> There was a bug with etqw/quake4 that i've just fixed, so currently it's
>> pretty bug-free.
>>
>> These packages are not filling requirement, but are essential for games, as
>> these usually need S3TC support.
>>
>> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libtxc_dxtn_s2tc
>> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lib32-libtxc_dxtn_s2tc
>>
>> S2TC on github:
>> https://github.com/divVerent/s2tc
>>
>> Regards,
>> Laurent Carlier
> Do we really care about patents enough? Can't we just include the
> standard libtxc_dxtn?
> Even if we care - I heard that S2TC may be encumbered as well.

Personally, I don't think we care about patents enough and should slap
both libs in there. I think plenty of stuff we have in binary in our
repos is encumbered by patents but s3tc just happens to get a lot of bad
press on that particular part. It probably doesn't make it any more
"dangerous" to have than the other stuff we already package. Can we get
some more opinions on this particular point?