From research!kruskal Mon Nov 26 16:30:03 EST 1990 Kruskal 201-582-3853 MH 2C-281 Sent Mon Nov 26 16:30:02 EST 1990 To: Jon Bentley Cc: Eric Grosse Thanks for re-sending the information from David Johnson about "l2fit". I had not received it before, and I am glad to get it. At the same time, my interest is and was not particularly in l2fit, but rather in the whole suite of programs of which l2fit was merely one entry. Also, my interest is and was not only in my obtainng access to the programs, but also in making them generally available. That is why I suggested to you that you "ship" them to the suite of Tenth Edition Unix systems around here. I still hope you will consider shipping them. As an alternative, how about entering them into the research!netlib collection of source programs? I hope that Eric Grosse would be happy to add them to that data base. That would make them all generally available, and would not require the same degree of consent that shipping them would. Joe ------m jlb kruskal Sat Dec 1 23:46:04 EST 1990 To-: jlb kruskal Subject: one-liners in netlib Naturally, I'd be happy to distribute these by netlib. There are a few new aspects to think about. For example, when someone asks for l2fit, should they be sent just the awk script, or also the Port subroutines? Should they be told how to get the latest awk? Is it feasible to imagine the one-liner customers going through the pain of installing port and awk? Is it easy to describe exactly what flavors of vendor-supplied awk will suffice? Eric From nls Wed Dec 5 06:57 EST 1990 To: Joe Kruskal cc: ehg and jlb In reference to your request that the "1-liners" be put in netlib for distribution: The first pass, awk based, there has been very useful, but the only tool that has stood up well to use has been Bentley's " l2fit". The reason is that all the rest (ode and pde solvers, etc) really are part of a users problem, requiring input, solution and then manipulation of the output, or even further solves. That is, only l2fit seems to be a nice "self-contianed" application, the rest require an "open" language (rather like ratfor) so that the user can embed the solution in his larger problem. I think putting l2fit in netlib is a great idea. But putting the rest in would not be a good idea: we are replacing (slowly) them with a full-blown open language. That second pass should be worth putting into netlib when its ready. Norm Schryer Eric: I think we can come up with a README file that isolates the awk dependencies (maybe even the V10 src for it), make a l2fit.f file with the port3 src tree for nl2sol, etc, to make l2fit a reasonable self-contained package, so that folks can say: send src from l2fit and then simply "sh