NEURON for Debian
-----------------

This package provides the NEURON simulation environment for Debian.
Being software that started development in 1984, NEURON still uses the
InterViews[1] toolkit to display GUI components on X11.

Embedded code copies of NEURON and how they were handled in Debian
are listed below.

## InterViews

The InterViews version shipped by NEURON's upstream project is heavily
modified, and NEURON can not use the Debian copy of InterViews.
Additionally, InterViews might be completely removed from Debian soon.
Therefore, it was decided to embed the NEURON version of InterViews into
this package, but place it into a private library directory.
This ensures that only NEURON can use its "IVhines" copy of InterViews,
and we will never get library name clashes.

Hopefully NEURON will switch to a modern toolkit at some point in the future.

## Sundials

The embedded copy of Sundials[2] is not only very old (early 2005), but also
modified and stripped down by NEURON's authors.
Porting NEURON to a new Sundials version will be a significant effort, and
should not be done by Debian (== someone not very familiar with the code)
to not endanger the validity of NEURON's computations.
Since this modified copy of Sundials is also really small and pretty much
part of NEURON now, it has been kept as it is but is now statically linked,
to not produce a shared library that could name-clash with the real Sundials
or confuse people.

## Meschach

In case of Meschach[3], the Debian version of the software could be used with
minimal modifications on the source code of NEURON.

## Sparse

The NEURON libsparse library has been turned into a static library, as it is
NEURON specific but has a very generic name that could clash with existing
or future libraries.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterViews
[2]: https://computation.llnl.gov/projects/sundials
[3]: http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~dstewart/meschach/

 -- Matthias Klumpp <mak@debian.org>  Fr, 26 Jan 2018 21:18:10 +0100
