[Neurodebian-devel] Adding a resting-state fMRI toolbox to the repository

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2014, André Hoffmann wrote:

Hi Andre,

Was nice chatting to you at OHBM 14 (given the context I think it was
you ;-))

>    On 29 Jul 2014, at 14:24, Michael Hanke <[1]michael.hanke at gmail.com>
>    wrote:

>      The fslio that FSL builds against, in contrast, is maintained and more
>      advanced. However, it is treated as an integral part of FSL, changes
>      frequently and cannot become its own library package.

>    It couldn�t even become a standalone package in the non-free section?
>    So I�m neither supposed to be using the library from nifticlib because
>    it�s out-dated and nor the one from FSL because of licensing issues?
>    That�s quite tricky :-/
>    I suppose if no one comes up with a different idea I�ll have to find a way
>    to remove that dependency altogether..

Ideally -- yes, BUT

comparing code of fslio as shipped within nifticlib and fsl: 

- fsl team introduced IMHO a minimal set of changes to it since
  the version in nifticlib and changes are not really that frequent

- both fslio.c and fslio.h "has now been placed in the public
  domain."

- they seems to be not using any other piece of FSL

- so theoretically (correct me if I am wrong), libfslio.so  could be
  also considered "GPL-compatible" and could be loaded at run time


So, I see two possibilities:

- Andre adjusts his code to just dlopen that library at run-time (given
  FSLDIR env variable to specify location of the FSL), just Suggest
  fsl-core package (can't recommend stuff from non-free)

- we do talk to FSL and NIfTI folks to adopt fslio changes from FSL
  codebase into nifticlib and build a system-wide available fslio
  library

-- 
Yaroslav O. Halchenko, Ph.D.
http://neuro.debian.net http://www.pymvpa.org http://www.fail2ban.org
Research Scientist,            Psychological and Brain Sciences Dept.
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834                       Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419
WWW:   http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik