Re: Follow-up to dependencies

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Op dinsdag 08-06-2010 om 14:56 uur [tijdzone +0200], schreef Mike
Solomon:

>     For now, I've clepped the lines of code I need from gsl (roughly 40) and
> put them in a file in lily/.  So everything works fine.  That said, I don't
> know what the GNU philosophy is about cutting and pasting from one part of
> GNU into another instead of using the prefab libraries...if that is frowned
> upon, I'd still like to work on making GSL a dependency.

It's good to know that copy&paste works as a simple solution.

You would have to see what the best solution is.  40 lines seems
manageable and the license allows copy and pasting.  How big is
gsl, does the cleaner solution outweigh the ugliness?

In the c&p-case, please make a clear marker of where and what version
you copied from.  Ideally, you want to describe the update process
and make it easy for others to update from a newer gsl version.

Cleaner would be to add it as a dependency, but only if

  * gsl is available on major linux distributions
  * gsl is well maintained or better: actively developed
  * gsl is somewhat stable (we don't want interface/api troubles 
    for only 40 lines of code)
  * gsl can be cross-built in GUB (someone will have to make the
    GUB recipe and changes)
  * we have a nice configure test to set it up
  * gsl is documented as a dependency

What are the alternatives, is there a boost library that is as good
or better?  Can we replace more code by using gsl (boost?)

Hope that helps,

Greetings,
Jan.