On 08/10/10 01:28 AM, William Stein wrote:
* Cephes Mathematical Library. Not in Debian. I cannot find any licensing
statement upstream nor in Sage's SPKG. I think it is free, but
debian-{policy,legal} will complain if we try to package this.
Maybe we should lobby for its removal from sage? Or maybe the license
issues can be resolved? Or Debian's sage may just need to skip it?
o http://www.sagemath.org/packages/standard/cephes-2.8.txt
This is only currently needed on Cygwin. It will never be needed for
Debian. Don't bother with it for Debian.
Also FreeBSD uses it, though again that's not an issue for Debian.
* f2c: Debian (20090411-1+b1) is way newer than Sage (20070816.p2).
We might need to push Sage to upgrade.
o http://www.sagemath.org/packages/standard/f2c-20070816.p2.txt
I think we only include f2c because of Scipy.
Given a fortran compiler is necessary to build Sage, why do we need to convert
Fortran to C? Wny not simply compile it with a fortran compiler?
* opencdk. This ships as part of gnutls. However, sage's fork differs
quite a bit from the code in gnutls. Do we need a package or is it
part of gnutls with no work needed? I don't know.
I think we only ship it since we need it in order to get GNUTLS, which
we only need
in order to provide a secure SSL mode for the Sage notebook. One
could also just use
openssl and completely get rid of the whole GNUTLS if Debian ships it
as a system library
and somehow dances around the non-GPL-compatible nature of OpenSSL.
I don't think dancing around GPL issues will be so easy with Debian, as it would
be on some other distributions.
IMHO, Debian are the most strict Linux group to deal with. I took a GPL program
and forked it, since it had not been updated for years. When I tried to get that
into Debian, they picked up on some things that were in the original GPL code
(also part of Debian), but then they decided the license was not clear on some
data files. Debian are strict on GPL issues.
Another program of mine, which I wrote from scratch
(http://atlc.sourceforge.net/), and released under GPL 2, I got contacted by a
Debian maintainer who wanted to include it, but I'd not put a date on it. So I
had to estimate when I'd started work on it. It's in FreeBSD and other Linux
distributions. Nobody else bothered, but Debian go over things with a fine tooth
comb.
Another strange thing is, I got contacted by a publisher who wanted *written*
permission of me for some GPL2 code I wrote (again http://atlc.sourceforge.net/)
to be included on a CD accompanying a book. When I pointed out it was GPL 2, so
they could include it, they said they needed my permission in writing. So I
agreed to put it in writing if I could get a free copy of the book, which they
agree to!
So don't think dancing around GPL issues with Debian will be so easy.
Dave
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