[Pkg-scicomp-devel] Request to Join Project Scientific Computing Debian Packages

[Ondrej Certik]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Johannes Ring <johannr at simula.no> wrote:
> On Mon, June 23, 2008 Ondrej Certik wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 11:58 AM, Johannes Ring <johannr at simula.no> wrote:
>>> Hi Ondrej,
>>>
>>> On Mon, June 23, 2008 Ondrej Certik wrote:
>>>> Hi Johannes,
>>>>
>>>>> On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 11:15 PM, <noreply at alioth.debian.org> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Johannes Ring has requested to join your project.
>>>>>> You can approve this request here:
>>>>>> http://alioth.debian.org/project/admin/?group_id=30921.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Comments by the user:
>>>>>> Hello,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> my name is Johannes Ring and I work as a Scientific Programmer at
>>>>>> Simula
>>>>>> Research Laboratory (http://www.simula.no) in Norway. Here at Simula
>>>>>> we
>>>>>> are
>>>>>> focusing on development of software (mostly open source) for
>>>>>> scientific computing and most of our researchers/developers are using
>>>>>> Debian or Ubuntu as their development platform. We want our software
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> be
>>>>>> as easy to install as possible for people running Debian/Ubuntu and
>>>>>> we
>>>>>> have
>>>>>> therefore set up a couple of repositories, which I am currently the
>>>>>> maintainer of. However, it would be even easier for the user if the
>>>>>> packages
>>>>>> were included in Debian/Ubuntu in the first place (no need to add
>>>>>> sources).
>>>>>> In that respect, I have been asked by my project leader Ola Skavhaug
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> Anders Logg, which is one of the main developers of the
>>>>>> FEniCS software suite (www.fenics.org), to try to become an official
>>>>>> Debian maintainer so that I can help in getting our packages into
>>>>>> Debian/Ubuntu. Since I am a Debian/Ubuntu guy (started with Debian in
>>>>>> 2000
>>>>>> but switched to Ubuntu Breezy in 2005 when I couldn\'t get my new
>>>>>> Thinkpad
>>>>>> to work in Debian) I would very much like to contribute in the
>>>>>> development
>>>>>> of Debian by maintaining and adding new packages. I have been aware
>>>>>> of
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> pkg-scicomp group for some time now and used several of the packages
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> are available there (like scotch, slepc, and trilinos), so I am sure
>>>>>> that
>>>>
>>>> If you could help me fix slepc, it'd be nice.
>>>
>>> Yes, of course, I would be happy to help you with SLEPc. I'm not sure if
>>> I
>>> can, but I'll do my best :-)
>>
>> Ok. :) I think currently it is completely broken, e.g. if you install
>> it and try to run any example, it will segfault.
>> The reason being that 2.3.3 is not redistributable by Debian, so we
>> need to use 2.3.2 and that doesn't seem to work with petsc2.3.3, e.g.
>> it compiles but segfaults on examples.
>
> Why can't 2.3.3 be distributed with Debian? Is it because of licensing
> issues?

Yes, they changed the license from 2.3.2 to 2.3.3, I think they added some
line like (you are not allowed to redistribute modified copies, or
something like that).

But all should be fine by the next version hopefully -- unfortunately
I think  Jose said they will have time for this by the end of the
year.

Ondrej