Hello John,

The first step in Fedora packaging is to check all the licensing issues. Iain has already done the important leg work of verifying that the license (MIT) is acceptable to Fedora, so that's an important hurdle that's been cleared. There is a non-free library for Perseus that is available as source code on the Internet, a non-free rpm package for Elad FDM-S1. Linrad comes with the commands required to download and install them. There is also the Adlink PCIe-9842 for which one has to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get the source code. (It provides a real-time bandwidth of 100 MHz!)

I don't think it would deter your changes of a Linrad package getting approved, but I did notice one thing that could use a little polish. Unix (and Linux) users often have an expectation that parameter files are always installed in a standard location (rather than the CWD).

You could leave things as they are on Windows and Macintosh, but under Linux have your *.par parameter files be located in the $HOME/.linrad/ directory. You could always check an appropriately named environment variable to accomodate the user that wants it somewhere else. (Maybe even allow sub-directories of $HOME/.linrad/ that contain *.par files for different radios). This would be a really bad idea. It is often a good idea to run several instances of Linrad in parallel and then they need different parameters. The implications of your suggestion is that there should be a layer on top of the parameter settings in which the user could browse a linrad directory for a certain set of parameters. Also functions to copy parameter sets would be needed. Actually the functions that the normal directory three supplies. This would make Linrad more difficult to use and would become an obstacle for users so if it is a requirement for a Fedora package I feel it is better to leave Linrad unpackaged.

Regards Leif