yade-dev team mailing list archive

[Janek Kozicki <cosurgi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

(I am sending this post also to the author of wild magic 3)


The author of wild magic v3 library has relicensed it under LGPL
which is good news.

Some time later Artur has prepared a testing version of debian
package for wm3, so that we can try to install it and run yade with
it. It's also a good news.

Currently there is only statically linkable version of wm3, but I did
a size comparison between old and new yade (with and without
external wm3) and directory yade-libs was only 2MB bigger. The file
libWm3Foundation.a has 1.6MB of size, so it means that wm3 is
linked statically only once (not to *every* .so file present there).
So I think that it's not a really big problem that wm3 is static.
I even compared file sizes file by file.


There is another problem however:

During packaging of wm3, Artur has discovered that this library is
unprepared for packaging into a linux distribution. The current .deb
package is a testing version, and making a correct package that
fullfills all the standard requirements for packages (not only debian
packages) will require a great deal of effort.

The effort is about reorganising the method of installing in the
directory structure, rewriting all the makefiles, doing a correct
autodection of dependencies, etc. This is a lot of work.

This work will have to be done to make a good debian package that
could be accepted into debian.

This work will have to be done to make a package for fedora, and for
suse, and for red-had, and for slackware, etc...

A repetative and difficult task.


The task will not be repetative, if, done once, will be accepted by
upstream (the author of wm3). Will he accept it? He is currently
working on wm4, not wm3.

And also, we risk using a library that is no longer maintained.
For example: we are not receiving bug fixes from upstream, because
the wm3 author is currently actively maintaining wm4 (which we cannot
use due to license problems).


The problem is a about future planning for yade:

+ we can use wm3 just for now, but only on debian derived systems

BUT:

- installing yade on non-debian derived system is currently very
difficult, due to lack of wm3 package for that linux distribution.
And making this package is difficult even for the people who are
*experts* in making packages for linux distributions.

- a common user who knows nothing about linux internals is at risk of
breaking his linux installation, when he tries to install wm3 (not
from a package, but from tarball), just to get yade running.


We are on shifting sands ground. Something must be done with it.
Possible solutions:

1. someone takes over the maintience of wm3. First he makes a
package-friendly version of wm3. Then later accepts the bug reports,
fixes them, and generally actively maintains the library. Artur
cannot do this task. He can only package this library, but not
actively maintain it!

2. wm3 is LGPL now, so we can do as it was done before - take a part
of it and include into yade (as a separate yade-package). It will be
legal solution, but not a clean solution. Vaclav hated it so much,
that one of the first things he did, was to remove wm3 from yade tree.

3. switch to another library, like http://www.vtk.org/ or
http://www.openscenegraph.org/ or maybe something else. But after wm3
author already decided to use LGPL, this would be a sad decision...

4. the author of wm3 will declare that he plans to actively maintain
the wm3 library. Receive bug-reports from the users, and fix the
bugs. And first thing that he will do, is to accept a
package-friendly version of wm3, which in this case Artur can prepare.


One of the first bugs to handle in wm3 is to compile it on 64bit
platform, because there arises a problem with int64 type, which
causes compilation failure. Artur was able to "force" a succesfull
compilation, but had no any method to tell whether the compiled
version would perform correctly the calculations.


-- 
# Janek Kozicki
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