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

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 10:54 -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:
> > 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.

http://www.rpmfusion.org/


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