ROOT for DebianScience
Do not miss coming [http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=a0522 ROOT international workshop].
Thanks to [http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00066.html Brad Sawatzky].
1. Debian (unofficial) packages
ROOT [http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00056.html provides a direct way to build deb packages from the sources] but is not in Debian main. See [http://cholm.home.cern.ch/cholm/root/debs/ here for some build instructions]. And [http://www.physi.uni-heidelberg.de/~gbrandt/root/non-free/ here] some unofficial prebuild. See also [http://aamorimsrv.fis.fc.ul.pt/ the ?PaiPix distribution as a source of ROOT debs]
[http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00093.html Ricardo Yanez work]
1.1. technical problems for packaging
[http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00090.html the biggest difficulty is that the ROOT libraries are both shared libs and also modules dynamically loaded by the main executable at runtime.]
[If ROOT was hacked to link against this library instead of using its own ["TMinuit"] class (derived from Cernlib FORTRAN code), it would no longer be in violation of the GPL with respect to Cernlib. http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00090.html]
[http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00090.html putting such a hacked version of ROOT in Debian non-free would be dependent on the permission of ROOT's upstream to allow its distribution, which might not be forthcoming.]
2. Licensing issues
[http://root.cern.ch/root/License.html ROOT License]
[http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/01/msg00278.html Debian legal thread] and [http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00085.html why] it is never too much to be careful about licenses. Some [http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00087.html fix] to the problem seems to be in sight.
[http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2005/08/msg00090.html Ricardo Yanez is working on .debs that will be Policy-compliant and suitable to upload into Debian as soon as the licensing situation is fixed.]
[http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/physics-software-rant.html educational article on licensing and more]