Re: Do we need quadrule in Debian
On 2025-01-08 18:21:59, Drew Parsons wrote:
> The (upstream) author John Burkardt was still publishing relatively recently
> https://doi.org/10.1007/s11075-019-00751-5
>
> though oddly Google is ignorant of that paper
> https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=7_8Uxs0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
>
> His source repository is still live
> https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/
>
> It's just that quadrule is not there, at least not by that name.
> Perhaps it's one of the many examples on his site.
>
> The quadrule source code actually cites the Debian maintainer (not developer) Mike Neish as author, not John Burkardt. It looks like it was actually written by Mike, inspired by John's work and examples.
>
> John's site provides dozens and dozens of little examples. I think Mike has collated them all and placed them into one quadrule.c.
>
> As far as the debian package goes, it could be dropped, unless Mike wants to move it to salsa and keep maintaining it. Interested users can look through the examples on John's site, or find the collation on snapshot.debian.org.
>
> The GSL does have some quadrature rules,
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/doc/html/integration.html#fixed-point-quadratures
> (one of John's samples is a test of the GSL).
>
> There is an attempt to bring it to C++ at
> https://github.com/emsr/quadrature
> though not developed further for 3 years now.
Apologies for the late response to this thread. I was the maintainer for this package a long time ago at another job. First I want to clarify I did not write quadrule.c, I just prepared it as a Debian library from the source I found on John Burkardt's site. Back at that time, there was a quadrule.c on that page, along with a C++ version, Fortran version and possibly other languages as well. The quadrature rules were useful for work I was doing, so I thought for convenience it would be nice to have that library available as a Debian package so others could use it as well.
I had noticed that the source would periodically be changed in-place on the website with no version control, so I started tracking the updates in a separate git repo (maybe it was tracked on Alioth?) and assigned a version based on the date I noticed the changes to the source. It appears that the original source is no longer on John's site (or split up into separate files now) and it's not clear how an up-to-date package could be created from the current state of things.
If the package is not actively being installed by anyone, and given that the upstream source may not even exist anymore in a coherent form, I have no objections to it being removed from Debian.
Thanks,
Mike
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