ConwayLife.com

I would like to make a mirror of the contents of http://www.conwaylife.com/patterns/all.zip available through a github repo. I would set up a nightly or weekly Travis CI job to pull down and sync the latest.

This would allow developers an easy path to include a great pattern library in apps. Of course its also easy to just download and unzip all.zip to your source tree, but this has the added benefit of making the pattern library discoverable through package managers such as npm. The repo could also contain the necessary config files to make package managers work.

Any thoughts please let me know, I'd appreciate it. I think just keeping _README_.txt intact is enough to keep credit where its due.

Similar discussion:
Redistributing plaintext pattern files: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3367

I want to point out that if you go to Golly->Help->Online Archives, you can download the lifewiki archive.

tomdunn wrote:I would like to make a mirror of the contents of http://www.conwaylife.com/patterns/all.zip available through a github repo. I would set up a nightly or weekly Travis CI job to pull down and sync the latest.

Offhand I don't see any problem with that. CA pattern files are freely available for copying, by very long tradition. Something similar is often done with the pattern collection in the Life Lexicon.

It's a very good idea to keep comments or other attribution information with each pattern wherever possible -- just because it can be so incredibly difficult to figure out where a pattern came from, once that attribution link is broken.

Thanks for the input, Dave. When I do this, I will leave files from all.zip untouched so all comments and attributions will automatically stay in tact. I will plan to only add additional files or scripts to the repo to support package managers and the like, and also some sort of readme to explain this.

Moosey - thanks for pointing out the links in Golly Help. Perhaps I could pull in other collections as well and build a pattern monorepo.