Re: Version to use in package for a program with non standard versioning
Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
> Stanfords Folding@Home client is not DFSG-free. Stanford won't release
> the source, and you need permission if you wish to write for a 3th party
> installer and no one is allowed to distribute the software. AFAIK, thats
> the reason why there's no F@H client in Debian.
>
> There is a Debian package by Nick Lewycky which installs the F@H client
> on Debian though.
> http://wagon.dhs.org/folding/
I don't recall needing permission to write a third party installer, but
they did want to look over the man pages I derived from the official
documentation. You're right that it will have to go into contrib. F@H
client is a thin wrapper that downloads cores which are built out of
BSDish or proprietary-licensed folding dynamics packages. They use
signed binaries to maintain integrity.
The reason it's not in Debian is because the packages still a little too
buggy for Debian-wide distribution. Or at least they aren't feature-rich
enough; see bug 261257 for details. Using only one CPU in an SMP box
isn't good for a distributed computing client.
Besides that, I'm not aware of any reason they couldn't go into Debian
contrib, if someone (qd or kfolding packagers?) were interested in
sponsoring them. Also, if qd and kfolding are going into Debian, we
should make sure that they cooperate with my F@H client out of the box.
Nick Lewycky
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