[Dune] state of Debian packages for dune

[Ansgar Burchardt]

On 04/04/2012 11:30 AM, Christoph Grüninger wrote:
> I did not get the point with the license issues for dune-grid. Is 2.2.2
> from Debian Policy Manual [1] ("wrapper packages or other sorts of free
> accessories for non-free programs" must be placed in contrib) the
> problem? To me dune-grid was enough without any external dependencies
> for a long time, I never though about it as only a wrapper package.

Having code to support non-free libraries such as UG or amiramesh in
dune-grid is no problem as the code itself is free.  However packages in
main cannot (build-)depend on non-main package.  So the Debian package
for dune-grid cannot be built with support for them.

I also prefer not having files in Debian packages that cannot be
modified with free tools such as the amiramesh example grids.  But as
these won't be usable with the dune-grid package in Debian anyway, I
just excluded them.

So I don't see any license problems with the current dune-grid package I
have prepared.  I plan to upload it once I found enough time to do a
final check.

> Jö mentioned license problems with UG and ALUGrid [2]. Can anyone
> provide informations in more detail?

For UG it is simple: as far as I know, UG cannot be redistributed, so it
cannot be included in Debian and thus the dune-grid package for Debian
cannot use it.

ALUGrid is licensed under the GPL-2.  This means any binary package of
it cannot link GPL-incompatible code such as METIS or ParMETIS.  Also
there is no package for it available in Debian.

Regards,
Ansgar