[Pkg-octave-devel] Packaging Octave 2.9.3

[folajimi]

On Thu, 29 Sep 2005, John W. Eaton wrote:

> 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

Dr. Eaton:

I noticed that correspondence from you and Dr. Bateman is sent out twice. I was
just curious to know if there is any reason why the content of each pair of
messages is identical, while the file sizes are different. Could you please
explain that?

JA