BRL-CAD on Gentoo

I'm very delighted to be able to announce that after more than five years of on-going effort by more than 25 people, BRL-CAD is now available on Gentoo's main portage tree [1]. Gentoo Linux users should be able to simply "emerge brlcad" and have a functioning install of BRL-CAD.

What took so long? The nitty gritty details are included in the Gentoo tracking system (#77197, [2]), but a couple of the main reasons are passive tasking and "open source growing pains".

Since Cliff Yapp's initial ebuild submission in 2005, BRL-CAD has undergone many transformations across more than 25 releases. Included in those changes that led to the final acceptance of an ebuild by Sébastien Fabbro was a decoupling of a customized Tk; resolution of numerous naming conflicts on libraries, binaries, and documentation; restructuring BRL-CAD's build system to support non-isolated installation roots (without wreaking havoc); extensive build system configurability for using system-installed libraries; and much more.

None of the issues were major obstacles or even time consuming by themselves, and the integration could have certainly happened in much less time if our developer resources were put against it. The beauty of this, though, is that it didn't consume any developer time other than to implement accommodations as they were identified. The open source community stepped up and made the rest happen.

So to that end, I'd like to thank everyone that has been involved over the years including those that worked on the early integration into the Gentoo science overlay, the various ebuild testers, and the Gentoo developers:

Mark B.
Tim Cera
Lucas Chiesa
Rogier Eggers
Mark Euston
Sébastien Fabbro
Luis Ferreira
Craig Finch
Martin Gugg
Facundo de Guzmán
Marcus D. Hanwell
Peter Jensen
Joe Krisch
Jesse Lavigne
Dongxu Li
Steve Long
Ciaran McCreesh
Yosef Meller
Christopher Sean Morrison
Bob Paddock
Thomas Raschbacher
Marijn Schouten
Michal Slonina
t35t0r
Richard Westwell
Cliff Yapp

Thank you all for your efforts!

If anyone is interested in being our ebuild maintainer, please do contact me off-list, via IRC, or on the brlcad-devel mailing list.

Cheers!
Sean

[1] http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sci-misc/brlcad
[2] http://bugs.gentoo.org/77197