Packaging FreeSurfer

FreeSurfer is a set of tools for analysis and visualization of structural and functional brain imaging data. It contains a fully automatic structural stream for processing cross sectional and longitudinal data. Packaging of FreeSurfer for Debian is a part of our general efforts to provide comprehensive neuro-imaging research support.

Status

The majority of FreeSurfer 5.1.0 has been released under seems to be DFSG-compliant FOSS license terms on 24 May 2011. We have started working on packaging. Following has been done

  • modularization of the FreeSurfer distribution into code and data components
  • FreeSurfer 5.1.0 FOSS code made available from our FreeSurfer GitHub repository
  • debian/patches contains a series of patches primarily to
    • rely on system-provided libraries where applicable
    • in general replace static inclusion with dynamic linking thus greatly decreasing size of distributed binaries and making deployment more modular

Todo

FreeSurfer packaging

  • Collect and provide all required libraries to link against
  • Decide on further separation in to binary packages
  • Decide on how to ship “freesurfer-cuda” (depends on non-free materials, so cannot be build by the source in Debian main component)
  • Investigate possibility to deprecate/replace functionality dependent on antique libraries which might have been or soon will be removed from Debian (e.g. xview)

References

The source code for this portal is licensed under the GPL-3 and is available on GitHub.