Re: Welcome to Debian Science!
Hi list! I must say that the creation of debian-science was a great idea.
On 8/1/05, Juergen Salk <juergen.salk@gmx.de> wrote:
> I am somewhat surprised that nobody mentioned Kevin McCarty's
> cernlib packages so far. These packages also include PAW,
> the "Physics Analysis Workstation", which is a really powerful
> tool for data analysis and graphical representation once one get
> used to it. I am using PAW along with HBOOK a lot on a regular
> basis.
Thanks for the kind mention! I confess that I don't use PAW a great
deal, myself -- mainly I use the MINUIT function minimizer and HBOOK
portions of Cernlib. The main drawback with Cernlib is that a lot of
the code isn't 64-bit clean (being mostly written in FORTRAN in the
80's with some bizarre calls into C for dynamic memory allocation) and
it looks nearly impossible to fix :-(
Right now I'm finishing up my thesis, written with gvim, so I use a
lot of LaTeX stuff. I also have need of a large number of image
creation and conversion packages (gimp, imagemagick, xfig, transfig,
ps2eps, psutils, gs-common) in order to convert various formats into
eps. I'm storing the whole thing in cvs (need to learn svn or some
more up-to-date RCS tool one of these days).
The embarrassing thing is that most of my analysis is done in Root and
Mathematica. I would give a lot for a DFSG-free symbolic computation
package but AFAIK nothing is close to matching Mathematica right now.
Root, on the other hand, is pretty close to being DFSG-free, except
for one obnoxious clause in their license which, being
GPL-incompatible, also makes their linkage against Cernlib (GPL) a
problem. Ricardo Yanez is working on Root Debian packages, with some
suggestions from me, in anticipation of Root fixing their license
(which they have been promising to do for literally years now). I
would love to whine about similar licensing problems common to a lot
of free physics software (that's free as in "beer plus you usually get
to see the code"), but that's an entirely new thread.
Apologies if this message is badly formatted -- this is my first
attempt to use a gmail account to post to debian lists.
regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
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