Anonymous downloads for NCL/NCARG, PyNIO and PyNGL?

Greetings NCL Community,

I am considering writing build scripts that would make NCL, PyNIO and
PyNGL available through a package manager.  However, an issue that is
causing a sticking point is that the tarballs containing source code
for these packages are not available for anonymous download from
earthsystemgrid.org.  Even though registration and downloading are
free, this extra step creates some problems:

- The presence of an additional step could turn many potential users
off to installing the software. Many people would prefer to run a
command like `<package manager> install ncl` and move on to using the
software. Having to register, download and move the tarball into a
specific directory may relegate NCL and associated Python bindings to
the "Meh, why bother" category of software.

- More importantly, the absence of an anonymous download makes it more
difficult to use NCL in environments where servers are deployed and
provisioned automatically by software such as Chef or Puppet. NCL
would have to be provided as a pre-downloaded tarball--- a requirement
that adds complexity to an operation that should be kept as simple as
possible by having a package manager handle as much as possible as
automatically as possible.

It appears to me that NCL and friends are distributed under a very
permissive BSD-style license--- is there some reason they are not
available for anonymous download as well?

-Charlie

----------
Charlie Sharpsteen
Contributor: Homebrew Package Manager
http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
_______________________________________________
ncl-talk mailing list
List instructions, subscriber options, unsubscribe:
http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/ncl-talk
Received on Tue Oct 12 11:37:31 2010