Packaging FreeSurfer¶
FreeSurfer is a set of tools for analysis and visualization of structural and functional brain imaging data. It contains a fully automatic structural stream for processing cross sectional and longitudinal data. Packaging of FreeSurfer for Debian is a part of our general efforts to provide comprehensive neuro-imaging research support.
Status¶
The majority of FreeSurfer 5.1.0 has been released under seems to be DFSG-compliant FOSS license terms on 24 May 2011. We have started working on packaging. Following has been done
modularization of the FreeSurfer distribution into code and data components
FreeSurfer 5.1.0 FOSS code made available from our FreeSurfer GitHub repository (temporarily taken offline)
debian/patches
contains a series of patches primarily torely on system-provided libraries where applicable
in general replace static inclusion with dynamic linking thus greatly decreasing size of distributed binaries and making deployment more modular
Todo
FreeSurfer packaging
Collect and provide all required libraries to link against
Decide on further separation in to binary packages
Decide on how to ship “freesurfer-cuda” (depends on non-free materials, so cannot be build by the source in Debian main component)
Investigate possibility to deprecate/replace functionality dependent on antique libraries which might have been or soon will be removed from Debian (e.g. xview)
References¶
Debian ITP bug report with additional information on the packaging progress.
FreeSurfer GitHub with the full source code and the Debian packaging