[Fwd: request re. gretl]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

The way this would work is that we need a volunteer to package gretl for
the Fedora Project (see http://fedora.redhat.com/). Red Hat Linux has
split into two descendants, the Fedora Project and Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (see http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html).

I'm forwarding your mail to the Fedora Project developer's mailing list
where potential package maintainers are likely to see it.

Havoc

--- Begin Message ---

• From: Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>
• To: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
• Subject: request re. gretl
• Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 21:07:01 -0400 (EDT)

Dear Havoc,

I've looked over the RedHat website trying to find who's the right
recipient for this request, but it was not obvious.  I wonder if you'd
be good enough to pass this on to the right person.  Thanks very much.

Request that gretl be packaged with Red Hat Linux
=================================================

This note makes a pitch for the inclusion of my statistical analysis
program, gretl, in Red Hat -- in whatever locus is thought most
suitable (regular, contrib, Power Tools, ...).

Details on gretl are available at http://gretl.sourceforge.net/
I will add a few points here that might be relevant in context.

* The program is primarily intended for econometric analysis, so it is
  admittedly not something that everyone will use.  But it is not
  hyper-specialized; it may be useful to anyone wanting to do
  statistical analysis beyond what is easily done in, say, Gnumeric.

* It is (says I) a worthwhile example of modern free software.  It
  uses the gtk2 GUI (or gtk 1.2 if gtk2 is not available), and
  cooperates with either gnome 2.X or gnome 1.4 (though it will also
  build without the gnome libs).  It "exercises" several useful
  libraries, from libxml to lapack, to GMP, to gtksourceview.

* gretl's home base is GNU/Linux, but I make a win32 version
  available, and many users have told me that gretl is better in some
  ways than the leading (and very expensive) commercial software for
  econometric analysis under Windows, namely Eviews 4.0.

* This is a reasonably mature program, recommended in connection with
  two substantial undergraduate textbooks in econometrics.

* gretl is currently packaged for Debian and (I think) Mandrake.  By
  this I mean people other than me do the packaging.  I have had
  useful feedback from the Debian packager, but have heard of the
  Mandrake packages only at second-hand.

My own Linux system is not "distro"-based.  I run a RedHat 7.3 server
so I'm able to build rh7.3 rpms of gretl, and I've done so for many
releases now, but this is not very up-to-date.

I would be very appreciative if it were possible to include gretl in
Red Hat, so that potential users are able to get good quality
up-to-date rpms -- and hopefully I could get useful feeback on any
build problems.

-- 
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC

--- End Message ---