On Sat, 7 Nov 2009 20:10:07 +0100 Francesco Poli wrote: > On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:34:31 +0100 Francesco Poli wrote: > > [...] > > On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:20:57 +0100 Alastair McKinstry wrote: > [...] > > > I've been looking at packaging SILO, a mandatory dependency of VisIt. > [...] > > This seems to be very awkward: a Free Software application (VisIt) > > which links with a non-free library (Silo) by the same authors! > > :-( [...] > I got in touch with Silo's upstream. > They quickly replied in an encouraging manner. > First thing they told me is that Silo is no longer a mandatory > dependency for VisIt: they say it's been an *optional* dependency for > quite some time. [...] > I think VisIt could be packaged for Debian (main) with the Silo plugin > disabled, while we wait for upstream to re-license Silo in a DFSG-free > manner... > Does it sound feasible?
Breaking news!!! :-) After a bit of persuading by some people (including me!), and after a long re-licensing process, Silo is now Free Software under a 3-clause BSD license: see the September 20, 2010 release notes at <https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/silo/release_notes.html> and the Silo-4.8-bsd*tar.gz downloads at <https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/silo/downloads.html> Unfortunately a couple of compression features were not re-licensed and hence the Free version of Silo lacks some compression capabilities (again, see the release notes). Anyway, the rest of the library now does comply with the DFSG! :-) This means that we are now looking for someone who volunteers to package the Silo library! ;-) -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/progs/scripts/pdebuild-hooks.html Need some pdebuild hook scripts? ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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