On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 10:54 -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:
I decided to try to help the cause of Bayesian statistics and the open source effort of the OpenBUGS group (http://www.openbugs.info/w/) by making some packages. In case you are not a statistically-inclined person, it is worth knowing that Bayesian Updating with Gibbs Sampling (BUGS) has caused something of a methodological landslide since the early 1990s, helping scholars to model processes that were thought to be too difficult.
In Linux, we do not have access to the OpenBUGS GUI, which
I've built deb and rpm packages for RedHat, Fedora and Ubuntu. They are available in my webspace and in the project.
I wish these could be in the official linux repositories, but I've not tried to put these into an official repository because there are 2 problems that seem prohibitive.
First, the (now open) code for OpenBugs is written in Object Pascal and it requires a compiler framework called "Black Box" which is, as far as I can understand, available only for MS Windows. The OpenBUGS team compiles that library, and then for linux we use some accessor scripts to send jobs to it.
This, of course, goes against the packaging policy that pre-compiled libraries are prohibited.
I was wondering if there could be an exception here, since the code is actually available and open. This is more reasonable than re-packaging the closed Nvidia drivers, for example.
f it's actually open, build from source. If it won't build from source due to a missing dependency, include that in Fedora, built from source. If that's not possible because something it needs isn't open, I don't see how this can be allowed.
Agreed, it sounds like the necessity of linking against a closed-source library is going to be unacceptable for Fedora proper. However, this is the sort of project that might be acceptable in RPM Fusion.