OpenBUGS program has a pre-compiled )S library from MS Windows. Any possibility to package it?

[Michael Ekstrand]

On 06/14/2011 07:41 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> PS:
> 
> Paul Johnson wrote:
>> I was wondering if there could be an exception here, since the code is
>> actually available and open.
> 
> Have you even looked at that "source code"? I just have:
> 
> 1. They refer to the Window$ download for the code. That's a .EXE file 
> created with some proprietary installer generator (probably something that's 
> part of that "Black Box" crap), 7z cannot do anything with it (and it can 
> unpack at least self extractors and NSIS installers). Rather than running 
> that EXE in WINE to get at the .odc files, I decided to look elsewhere, and 
> in fact found their repository, but:

I'm wanting to use BUGS myself, so I've spent some time today poking
around at it.  Here's a report on what I've found; it might help in
future analysis or further work on making this software usable and
available.

They use Inno Setup for their installer, so it is "proprietary" in the
sense that the format is not standardized, but Inno Setup is open
source.  Its source code has been used to write innounp[1], an unpacker
for Inno Setup files.

Unfortunately, Inno Setup and innounp are written in Delphi, so the
usefulness diminishes at that point.  However, it should be possible to
construct a portable unpacker using the innounp sources as a reference,
and it may even be possble to build them with FreePascal, depending on
how much Delphi-specific stuff they use.

Also, there is the cp-dev project[2] for building Component Pascal
programs on Linux, but it seems to want plain text input (.cp rather
than .odc) and also seems to require Black Box to bootstrap. I do not
know if it is self-hosting after the initial bootstrap.

So, a from-source build is still a ways off, but not necessarily
entirely unfeasible. If cp-dev is self-hosting, license-clean[3], and
capable of building OpenBUGS, is there a way to get it in to Fedora?  It
seems it would require running an initial pre-compiled binary,
bootstrapped with Black Box, to then be able to recompile cp-dev from
SRPMs and use the recompiled version to keep it up to date.

There is still the issue of the lack of a free software viewer and
editor for the .odc files, but that seems to be a separate issue from
that of being able to re-build OpenBUGS with a completely free toolchain.

It could be that OpenBUGS will forever need to live in third-party
repositories.

- Michael

1. http://innounp.sourceforge.net/
2. http://cp-dev.sourceforge.net
3. cp-dev seems to not only use Black Box to bootstrap, but it also
seems to use Black Box sources as a part of itself.  I have not yet
investigated whether this is true and, if true, how the relevant sources
are licensed.