Hi debian-science, I'm giving up some unofficial science-related Debian packages and web infrastructure. Anyone who wants should feel free to take them over. If you do so, it's probably best for purposes of coordination if you so announce to this list ;-) If no one takes over this stuff, most of it will probably disappear into the ether (or at least the recesses of web.archive.org) when I retire from Debian in the not-very-distant future. 1) "Cernlib on Debian" web pages for official Cernlib, etc. .debs You can find them here: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/cernlib/ Anyone taking over the Cernlib packages and related may want to take over these web pages also. They aren't part of the packages. 2) Unofficial Debian packages for non-free package builder/installer, XyMTeX and non-free Monte Carlo libs See here for info: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/cernlib/nonfree.html#mc I wrote a (kind of lame) apt-src wrapper in POSIX sh called "ancis" that acts as a wrapper for packaging stuff that is non-redistributable as well as non-free. In principle it could be improved and put into Debian proper if someone wanted to do the work. I've thought for a while that it would be nice for Debian to have a single standard solution for all the non-free data that various installer packages need to download, but have been too timid to enter "ancis" into the occasional debian-devel flamewars on this subject. The "xymtex-installer-data" and "montecarlo-installer-data" packages are ugly hacks: they have debconf postinst hooks that cause ancis to download source code and build .debs out of the targeted software. XyMTeX [0] is a non-redistributable [1] LaTeX add-on targeted at organic chemists that lets you create line drawings of organic molecules. [0] http://xymtex.com/fujitas3/xymtex/indexe.html [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/12/msg00029.html It's conceivable the author may have re-thought his wish for the package to be non-redistributable since 2005, but one would have to ask him. The Monte Carlo libraries in question are particle physics simulation libraries that are distributed by Cernlib upstream but have licensing conflicts or non-freeness that prevent them from being distributed by Debian. The only one of these still being actively updated is Pythia6 [2]. There is now a GPL'ed version, Pythia8 [3] so someone might want to package that officially. (I'm not clear on whether Pythia6 was relicensed to GPL.) Pythia8 does not completely replace Pythia6 as it is not drop-in compatible, being written in C++ instead of Fortran. [2] http://home.thep.lu.se/~torbjorn/pythiaaux/recent.html [3] http://home.thep.lu.se/~torbjorn/Pythia.html 3) Geant4 unofficial .debs See here: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/Geant4 and here: http://lcg-heppkg.web.cern.ch/lcg-heppkg/debian/ There was not a clear consensus on debian-legal [4] as to whether the Geant4 license is suitable for main; unfortunately, unless something has changed since I last checked, the CLHEP library that it depends on [5] does not have any license, despite repeated pestering of CLHEP upstream. As CLHEP is now in maintenance only mode, this doesn't seem likely to change so it's unlikely that official .debs of Geant4 will ever exist unless Geant4 upstream moves away from CLHEP. [4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2006/07/msg00016.html [5] http://wwwasd.web.cern.ch/wwwasd/lhc++/clhep/ best regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@gmail.com> WWW: http://www.starplot.org/ WWW: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/ GPG: public key ID 4F83C751
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