What software is missing in the Fedora repository?

[Suvayu Ali]

I thought I had posted this earlier, but while going through the 
archives I realised it wasn't there. So here it goes again.

Suvayu Ali wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am doing a quick survey for software that you use on a regular basis
>> that is not available via the Fedora repository. Software that you
>> suggest should be free and open source, free of patent and other legal
>> issues.
>>
>> Tell me the home page of the software and give me a brief description on
>> what it does.  Bonus points if you can see in Google for "software-name
>> fedora package review" to figure it if it is already in the Fedora
>> package review queue. If you know of RPM packages in other distributions
>> for the software your are suggesting, that information is useful as well.
>>
> Hi Rahul,
> I would really love to see the data analysis framework, ROOT[1] in 
> Fedora. I know the user base is very niche, mostly data analysis in High 
> Energy Physics. But still ... there are many other such popular data 
> analysis tools which build on ROOT, like HippoDraw.
> 
> Although the design goals for ROOT are very focused on data analysis for 
> High Energy Physics, it implements almost any statistical and analysis 
> technique under the sun making it extremely flexible and versatile. It 
> even implements many visualization and GUI-builder tools, interfaces 
> with scripting languages like Python and provides a very handy 
> interpreter for C++ called CINT. So if anyone wants to, they can very 
> easily use ROOT for other kinds of data analysis. I for example learned 
> from their mailing list, that there are people using ROOT analysing 
> images in astrophysics!
> 
> And the best thing about all this is, the developers are very active and 
> prompt in fixing bugs and they officially support rpms for Scientific 
> Linux[2]. Apart from this there is a strong user community for support 
> apart from the developers being very active in the user mailing list. It 
> would be nice to add something like this to the educational packages 
> category for Fedora.
> 
> As for the concerns about being *free*, it is completely open source and 
> uses GPL libraries like GNU Scientific Library and is already available 
> in the Debian repositories[3].
> 
> [1] http://root.cern.ch/drupal/
> [2] http://root.cern.ch/root/Version522.html (the latest stable build)
> [3] http://packages.debian.org/source/squeeze/root-system
> 


-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.