[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 2.9.3

[David Bateman]

John W. Eaton wrote:

>On 29-Sep-2005, David Bateman wrote:
>
>| context... I'd also suggest building two versions of ufsparse. One that 
>| depends on metis and one that doesn't (check -DNPARTITION flag of 
>| UFsparse) and let the person installing the software decide if they want 
>| to be completely free or not...
>
>This might be OK for the general question of packaging METIS, but it
>is not really OK for Octave.  The "user does the link" is not an
>acceptable way to avoid the GPL.  OTOH, this seems to be another one
>of those cases where it is not really clear to me what is allowed by
>the GPL, since it seems that the same functionality is there without
>METIS (is that correct?) but the performance would not be as goo?
>That would seem to me to be similar to vendor BLAS implementations,
>which we currently allow (the interface is the same, and there are
>multiple implementations of the library, including free versions).
>  
>
This is indeed the case. Using the -DNPARTITION flag in the compile of 
CHOLMOD will prevent UFsparse from having the dependency on METIS. 
PMETIS is already in debian non-free and so I don't really see the issue 
here. Octave links to UFsparse that is licensed under a combination of 
LGPL and GPL, and it is the particular version of UFsparse that 
determines whether METIS is needed or not...

Cheers
David

-- 
David Bateman                                David.Bateman at motorola.com
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