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

[Johannes Ring]

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?

>>
>>> BTW, I just spoke with
>>> Jose Roman, the main author of it
>>> here at PMAA08 (http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/pmaa08/) and if everything
>>> goes well I think the next version will be opensource (LGPL),
>>> which is a great news.
>>
>> Yes, that would be great.
>
> Yep. We may as well just wait until they release a new (truly free)
> version and just fix that.

Yes, I guess so.

Johannes