[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 2.9.3

[John W. Eaton]

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).

jwe