what is the role of the bat/ directory?

[WeepingClown13]

Hi,

Let me first explain the context of my question a bit. I am packaging presenterm for debian and I have basically a fully working packaging. But I am bit confused by the role of the bat/ directory. It basically contains scripts to clone third party repositories, precompiled binaries, etc., and results in some complicated copyright scenario. In debian where we have to care about copyrights a lot, I am very confused by some of it. And another thing is that, I don't know how exactly it is supposed to be working either, in the sense that whether this directory has any role in the build itself, and also if there will be any problems per se if I remove the whole directory from the source.

I understand bat is relied upon for syntax highlighting, but I don't get what role the bat/ directory itself plays in that. From the short read I gave it, what I understand is it probably caters to --acknowledgements CLI flag. Is there an extended usage?

The easiest solution for me to deal with this is to drop the directory itself from the source, and patch out the CLI flag if that is affected. But that is given it does not affect anything else. What is the sensible thing to do here? Note that internet access during biuild time or precompiled files in soure are not allowed in debian, so there is more reasons to go this root.

[mfontanini]

Hi! Those files are used to do syntax highlighting for snippets in presentation. Specifically, the bat directory contains:

• bat's syntaxes.bin file which contains syntax highlighting definitions for various languages. This file is a "compressed" version of a bunch of third party syntaxes that other people have built. e.g. bat takes all of those syntaxes and packages them into a single file.
• bat's themes.bin file which contains various themes that define which colors to use when highlighting code. Similar to the above, this file is a "compressed" version of a bunch of files, most of them third party, a couple of them bat-specific.
• An acknowledgements.txt file that contains bat's license + all of bat's third party licenses provided for the files above.
• Scripts to clone the bat repo and update these 3 files.

These 2 files are necessary for presenterm to function correctly, otherwise you'll have no syntax highlighting at all for any languages. When presenterm is built, it will embed the contents of those files so they're available to highlight code in presentation snippets.

As for copyright concerns, the --acknowledgements flag does essentially the same as what bat --acknowledgements does but it also adds bat's license. I don't know a lot about licensing but I'd guess if this is wrong then what bat is doing is also wrong. Basically they ship other people's syntax highlighting and theme files and provide acknowledgements for them via --acknowledgements, and I do the same and acknowledge all of those that they acknowledge + bat itself. Is there a better way of doing this?

[WeepingClown13]

So as I understand it, the files syntaxes.bin and 'themes.bin' just has to be there, from bat. I can probably get away with dropping the bat directory in such a case by using symlinks to the debian packaged librust-bat-dev instead (or even directly calling them instead of symlinks). That means I can also stop worrying about all the copyright stuff as it is already dealt by the existing bat packaging.

In the matter of copyright, I would say that there is nothing wrong with what you are doing. You are adding proper copyright information for all the components, which is a great thing. If what I am going to do works, it will not have the acknowledgements for bat itself, but I can live with that. In the case of my packaging bat will be a dependency anyway, so I don't think I will be neglecting it per se.

[WeepingClown13]

Well, I managed to work it out with the packaged bat and also made sure it outputs the same things as here. All is well :)