DPUSER + QFitsView progress, and a RFH
Hi all,
I silently adopted the RFA for DPUSER and QFitsView [1], and created a
package for it in our repository [2].
The package is built from the latest 3.2 release candidate, using Qt5
and VTK6 for QFitsView. Almost everything looks fine.
HOWEVER: there is a major licensing issue. DPUSER/QFitsView use
originally PGPLOT, which is non-free software. Therefore, in Debian/main
we can't have this in its original form. But we also can't build it in
Debian/contrib, since DPUSER is licensed (mainly) by the GNU Public
License, and this license effectively forbids linking against a non-free
library. That means, that every binary distribution of DPUSER or
QFitsView linked to PGPLOT is illegal!
The version that is currently in the repository had the PGPLOT
dependency removed; so there is basically not plotting available
(graphics in QFitsView is working well, however). That may make DPUSER
unsuitable for some use cases; however there is currently no quick
solution for that.
One solution /may/ be to switch to PLPLOT. PLPLOT uses a similar
philosophe as PGPLOT, and there is already some Fortan-90 code that
provides a drop-in-replacement for many functions [3].
So, if you are a user of DPUSER and want to have the plotting back,
please consider to jump in here. I will always help in case of
difficulties.
Best regards
Ole
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/472961
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-astro/packages/dpuser.git
[3] http://pg2plplot.sourceforge.net/
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