[Pkg-octave-devel] Adding an Octave-dependent software into Debian

[Sébastien Villemot]

Hi everyone,

I am a co-developper of Dynare, a free software for the resolution and  
estimation of a family of economic models called Dynamic Stochastic  
General Equilibrium (DSGE) models. Dynare has become quite popular  
among macro-economists, and is now used in many central banks and  
universities.

The project homepage is: http://www.dynare.org

Dynare source code is covered by the GPL 3 (except a few files which  
are in the public domain); documentation is covered by the GFDL  
(without invariant sections).

Basically Dynare consists of three parts:
- a preprocessor (written in C++) which parses a text file containing  
the model description, and dumps Octave/Matlab intermediary files
- a collection of Octave/Matlab routines
- a few dynamically loadable libraries (DLL), called from  
Octave/Matlab, for time-critical algorithms

Historically Dynare has been developed and used under Matlab. With a  
few minor changes we made it run under GNU Octave 3.0 (although a few  
features are still problematic).

I would like to make Dynare enter the official Debian project. I have  
already created a Debian package for the latest stable version of  
Dynare (see http://www.dynare.org/DynareWiki/InstallOnDebianOrUbuntu).  
However note that my packaging is probably not suitable for direct  
entry into Debian, because it creates both Octave and Matlab DLLs, the  
latter being obviously not desirable for a Debian package.

I have ideas on how to improve the packaging, and of course I would be  
willing to do the necessary work for creating a 100% policy-compliant  
package.

Do you think that I should open a RFP bug? Do you know of anyone who  
would be willing to become a sponsor for this?

Best regards,

Sébastien Villemot
Bank of France