Hi all,

as of today FSL is now an offical Debian package. From now on the latest
version of the package will always be available from the Debian mirrors.

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/fsl
(currently down for maintainance)


This new situation has a number of advantages:

Bandwidth and availability
	Debian's mirror system is much more powerful and reliable than my
	little server.

Platforms
	So far I have built packages for amd64 and i386. Debian's buildd
	network will build it for at least:
		alpha, amd64, arm, i386, ia64, hppa, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc,
		s390 and sparc

	Some of the above aren't really useful for FSL, but still a great
	improvement.

Bug tracker
	If you run FSL on a Debian system, you can now use the great
	'reportbug' tool to complain about a (potential) bug, like you would
	do for any other software. Debian's bug tracking system will keep track
	of all bugs (even solved ones) for reference. A list of all bugs will
	always be here (publicly available to increase the pressure to solve
	open bugs ;-):

	http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?ordering=normal;archive=0;dist=unstable;repeatmerged=1;src=fsl

Code quality
	Debian constantly runs checks on the packages in it's archive, e.g.
	to test whether packages can be compiled with the upcoming GCC 4.3.
	This way bugs can be discovered (and solved) even before they hit users.
	Almost nobody will notice it, but this is a great improvement wrt
	the quality.

Transparency
	If you care about the status of the FSL package -- perhaps you are an
	admin and have to make sure that your installation works, you can subscribe
	to the package tracking system (PTS):

	http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fsl.html

	This will keep you up-to-date, e.g. by notifying you about new uploads,
	reported bugs and following discussions about them.


All FSL tools and documentation is now available directly from Debian in
the packages: fsl, fslview, fsl-doc, fslview-doc. However the old
repository (in Magdeburg) is not yet obsolete as the data packages
(fsl-atlases, fsl-first-data, fsl-possum-data and fsl-feeds) are not yet
in Debian. Due to their size (>1GB) they need some special handling -- I
hope to solve that soon.


A note to the Ubuntu users: I'm not sure whether the Ubuntu guys will
pick-up the FSL package from Debian (as they do with a lot of other
packages), because of it's non-free license. If they do, FSL will also
be available from the Ubuntu archive. However, the current Ubuntu
related bugs (incompatibilty with dash) will remain.

Please also note, that using 'reportbug' on an Ubuntu system will _NOT_
send the bugreport to the Debian bug tracking system.

If you run Ubuntu, give Debian a try. Among a lot of other stuff you
automatically get the latest and greated of this software

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMedImaging

Finally, the latest package version in Debian is now 4.0.2-2. I'm going
to update the binary packages for etch and ubuntu soon. A notable
improvement of this version is that it allows to build a debug-version 
of FSL (compiled with -O and -g) using standard Debian procedures, by
adding 'noopt' and 'nostrip' to the DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS environment
variable. This makes it a lot easier to debug.

see http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html#s10.1


Happy holidays,

Michael


-- 
GPG key:  1024D/3144BE0F Michael Hanke
http://apsy.gse.uni-magdeburg.de/hanke
ICQ: 48230050