Re: Replacing iausofa-c by erfa
Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> writes:
>> Therefore, I would like now to move SOFA to non-free in jessie. Are
>> there any objections for this?
> While I'm not strongly opinionated about this I wonder what might be the
> sense to move a package which was once accepted in main should be moved
> to non-free. I understand thet the license is not "nice" but IMHO it
> does not move it to non-free.
I must say that I am unsure whether it is really DFSG-free. The point
here is that one cannot create a drop-in-replacement by changing the
source, since the license then requires a name change. IMO this is
agains the spirit of freedom in OpenSource. BTW, Fedora (which has quite
similar criteria for inclusion as Debian) did not allow SOFA to enter [1].
> It would be another thing if you would say that erfa is a complete
> drop in replacement and we could drop SOFA at all without loosing
> anything.
Erfa is a complete replacement of SOFA, just not drop-in. For me, this
is more an argument *for* the removal of SOFA (from main), since SOFA in
the moment has no dependencies in jessie). If we wait, things may get
more complicated because of upcoming dependencies.
If someone would need SOFA in future, he also could use Erfa just by
replacing the names in its package, as I did for starlink-pal [2].
If that turns out to be inacceptable, we could then re-export all
symbols from erfa under the SOFA names. We also could re-create SOFA
completely from Erfa by changing the names back to the SOFA ones -- not
nice to IAU, but covered by the (BSD) license of Erfa.
I don't see a use to keep SOFA in Debian anymore. SOFA turns out to be
more a reference implementation than software that should be used.
Best regards
Ole
[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/legal/2012-November/002041.html
[2] http://sources.debian.net/src/starlink-pal/0.3.0-3/debian/patches/use_liberfa.patch
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