Comment 1 for bug 1037335

I got the following mail from the debian maintainer. It seems to be a licensing issue. Maybe we could have an ubuntu specific patch that includes the cg plugin?

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AFAIK libCg does not meet Debian Free Software Guidelines, so it has
to be distributed under non-free (or even installed by users
independently, I am not sure). Consequently, the cg-plugin has to
live in the "contrib" area, because it depends on non-free software.
If cg-plugin is not separated, then all of OGRE would have to be in
contrib, which would be far from ideal.

Additionally, last time that I checked (and it was not long ago) the
packages of libCg in Debian were very outdated, I am not sure if it's
because lack of will or because a change in license upstream (or other
technical reasons) makes it difficult to have it updated. It can also
happen that because libCg or other libraries OGRE cannot be updated to
newer versions, because it depends on newer versions of those
libraries.

There are other nasty licensing and code duplication issues with the
package right now that even risk to have it released in the next
stable (samples will have to be removed, probably, due to the media
files not having proper licenses). All of this only puts more and
more burden on the shoulders of the maintainers, even to a point that
the package in Debian (and Ubuntu) was stuck for a year with 1.6
series after 1.7 had been released, the package was basically not
maintained until I took over:

[2011-02-06] Accepted 1.7.1-1 in unstable (low) (Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo)
[2009-10-01] Accepted 1.6.4.dfsg1-1 in unstable (low) (Michael Koch)

So basically, all of those reasons is why I am not inclined to include
Cg plugin into the package any time soon, no. Having it will be a
considerable burden to take while keeping the package in good shape,
so the alternative might be to not have OGRE packages at all.

There's a quick solution for those interested in the Cg plugin:
recompile the source .deb package while having libCg installed; maybe
have to tweak a couple of lines in debian/rules, but it should be