Question about the criteria for a library to be in contrib

[Michael Wild <themiwi@gmail.com>]

Hi all

I recently filed the IPT http://bugs.debian.org/620135 for the ViennaCL
[1] library. It is a header-only library (i.e. there is no binary
package, only header files are installed), that uses OpenCL. So, only
when the user of the package compiles a program using ViennaCL it is his
responsibility to make sure that there is an implementation of OpenCL
present on his system. Unfortunately, currently there are no free
implementations of OpenCL available, so the user has to resort to the
proprietary libraries made available by either Nvidia or AMD. So, David
Brenmer raised the question [3] whether ViennaCL would be forced to be
in contrib because of that fact.

I find this hard to believe, since the package only uses the free and
publicly available API defined by the Khronos group and it is up to the
user of the package against which implementation of OpenCL he wishes to
link.

I hope somebody here can shed some light on this issue.

Thanks and all the best


Michael

[1] http://viennacl.sf.net
[2] http://www.khronos.org/opencl/
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/620135#15