Bug#698527: Elmer: few good news related to licensing.

[Boris Pek]

Hi Peter,

> Now actually we have some plans to work a little bit with the packaging of
> Elmer. Part of the motivation is that our Windows installer has become
> gradually obsolete. We would also like to make the cross compilation easier.
> Therefore we thought about changing the build system from autotools to cmake.
> To my understanding this should make also the Linux packaging more
> straightforward. Actually Sami already submitted the first cmake scripts.
>
> As you've extensive experience in packaging for Debian would you have any
> guidance on how what to consider in the going to cmake, or whether you see
> this generally as a good idea for Debian packaging? Unfortunately most of our
> time goes to the development of Elmer so this work does not have the highest
> priority. However, I see this is important because for many users the
> compilation is a no-go. With some outdated installers out there also many of
> the bug reports are not relevant any more. Improved packaging would resolve
> many of these problems.

Personally I think that cmake is the most convenient build automation tool now.
And it is really good choice for cross-platform software. So I am glad to hear
about your intention to use cmake in the future.

Unfortunately I cannot point you to common guidance for cmake scripts, but if I
will find something that might be improved in specific cases, I will send you
patches. =)

As I see the number of developers is growing. What do you think about switching
the development process from SVN to Git?

If you need an example for testing, you may look at git-svn mirror [1] of your
repo. Its size is just about 198 MiB, but it contains full list of commits with
ability of fast navigation between them. Also IIRC SourceForge has Git support,
so you even would not need to change hosting.

[1] https://github.com/tehnick/elmerfem

Best regards,
Boris