> 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.