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Re: Will woody ever become stable?



On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 09:08:08PM -0800, David Schleef wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 10:52:38PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> > 
> > Well it has many example files that lacks permission to sell. See the
> > bug report. Worse though, it turned out one of its source files had the
> > same problimatic license. Upstream appears to be cooperating (sorta),
> > but there are delays getting a release from them and they seem to have a
> > weird policy of not licencing beta code freely or something.
> > 
> > David, is your replacement really a good enough replacement? It's odd
> > that Thimo hasn't commented it at all in the bug report.
> 
> Many of the math function implementations were replaced with
> calls to libc, such as erf(), erfc(), etc.
> 
> Two functions (incomplete beta (ibeta) and incomplete gamma
> (igamma)) were replaced with calls to libgsl.  It's not the best
> solution, since it adds a dependency, however, it removes math
> function implementations which are not as extensively tested as
> libgsl.  And, as I observed while testing, the gnuplot and libgsl
> implementations don't always agree to reasonable precision.  The
> gsl parts are #ifdef'ed for convenience.

> Uh... I just thought of something with using libgsl -- libgsl is
> GPL, so gnuplot might not be able to link with it.  Gnuplot is
> BSD-ish with a changes-distributed-as-patches restriction.

Exactly. That is the problem :( This also prevents me from using
libreadline instead of the **** builtin readline
 
> There were two functions that still need work, the inverse
> gaussian function and inverse error function.  Inverse gaussian
> can be replaced with some permutation of sqrt(-log(y)), but for
> some reason, the existing gnuplot function doesn't act like
> this, IIRC.  Inverse error function should be around somewhere,
> but I just haven't looked for it.

Well, even patches won't be the solution. It is easy (and I have
already done it) to create a free binary .deb by patching
specfun.c. But the orig.tar.gz will still contain the non-free
licenses and cannot enter the main source-part :( I really need a new
and free upstream release....

CU
    Thimo

-- 
Thimo Neubauer <thimo@debian.org>
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 frozen! See http://www.debian.org/ for details

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