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Starlink / starlink

Starlink Software Collection
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Missing mem2d? #59

Open poisson13 opened 7 years ago

poisson13 commented 7 years ago

I just finished building starlink and noticed that kappa/mem2d is missing although relevant files are included in the repo, and references to mem2d are abundant in the program suite.

MalcolmCurrie commented 7 years ago

This KAPPA application used the MEMSYS package. While MEMSYS was developed on a Starlink system at Cambridge, it was commercial software. At the dawn of the Internet age we weren't allowed to make available Starlink software that used commercial packages to unknown users around the globe. That's why we also replaced NAG calls with public-domain subroutines. This was about twenty years ago.

On persistent references: our code for applying the maxmum-entropy still exists in the released Starlink, in the hope that one day we would find a replacement maximum-entropy library in the public domain and resurrect MEM2D. Suggestions are welcome.

Yes I see that of the non-obsolete documents the KAPPA and Figaro manuals, and a Cookbook still have cross references. The KAPPA ones were probably retained for Starlink sites in possession of a MEMSYS licence. I shall correct all of these references. Thank you for the reporting the issue.

poisson13 commented 7 years ago

Thank you for the clarification. I am not very familiar with the inner workings of starlink so cannot say how usable the maxent library by Rue (http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hrue/mesrc.tar.gz, includes the code and relevant papers) is, but it is nevertheless GPL licensed fortran and thus possibly of interest.