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Packaging VistA - general comments



I was on vacation last week with only limited bandwidth (personal and TCP/IP), and am only catching up now with the discussions on packaging VistA. I am putting my comments in separate threads for separate topics and will post several over the next day or so. This first thread is general comments.

For what it's worth, the name "VistA" is owned by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). As the Microsoft OS is called "Windows Vista", there is no conflict of names or trademarks.

A VistA distribution (== Debian package size) will be around 160-200MB, depending on the VistA distribution (and whether it has sample patient data - distributions populated with sample patient data tend to be larger). If you want to break up VistA into multiple packages, you will need to create a meta package that depends on the individual packages, but all of it VistA will need to be present for it to work correctly.

VistA from the VA is in the public domain through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Those who have created various versions of VistA may refer to different licenses such as GPL v2, EPL, etc. What this really means is that their changes which may affect perhaps 1000 modules out of 25000 modules carry a license. Note also that each VistA routine is always dynamically linked by each process at execution time.

Regards
-- Bhaskar

--
GT.M - Rock solid. Lightning fast. Secure. No compromises.

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