Arch Linux

Sigi

Member

From: Thurgau, Switzerland

Registered: 2005-09-22

Posts: 1,131

Salome (mesh, CFD, FEM) packaging questions

I'd like to try out salome on Arch.
Therefore a few thoughts before I start working on it:

- Is there someone already running Salome on Arch? Is there someone else interested in salome?
- How should I write the PKGBUILD?
Should I split up the package in a lot of sub-packages - as I've done with elmer (in AUR) - or should I try to provide one master-PKGBUILD including all the packages? How about the sample stuff in the sources? (sources = 69MB!)
- It's necessary to registrate on the website to download the sources of salome. Am I allowed to mirror the sources to provide a clean way of providing them?
- If I split up the package. Am I allowed to split up the original source package in my mirror if I include the GPL in every file?

Please post your thoughts on this topic!

Cheers Sigi

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Haven't been here in a while. Still rocking Arch.

djscholl

Member

From: Michigan, USA

Registered: 2006-05-24

Posts: 56

Re: Salome (mesh, CFD, FEM) packaging questions

I am not a lawyer, so these are software packaging opinions, not legal opinions. You are allowed to mirror LGPL source code, and you can split it up as long as a copy of the original license file (COPYING, LICENSE, etc.) accompanies each part of the original source code. Note that you may be required to remove trademarks (names or images) from the source code distribution if you mirror or modify it.

That being said, I would encourage you to contact the authors and try to accommodate their preferences regarding mirroring and splitting packages, even if they ask you not to do things that the LGPL gives you a right to do. They may have a valid reason to ask for registration, e.g., to collect user statistics to help obtain grants of support for continued development. Building this package from the AUR and using it looks non-trivial, even with all of the help that a good PKGBUILD provides. Having to register and manually download the source tarball before running makepkg doesn't seem like that much additional work to me. If it helps makes the authors happy to to have Arch users, this will help communication later, and with a package of this complexity, there are sure to be issues to discuss. The closer the Arch installation is to what users of other distros have, the easier it will be to diagnose problems. The samples may be useful for diagnosing user's problems, so you may at least want to include them in your PKGBUILD in commented-out form, to make it easy for a user to add them.