Re: update to sphere.c in randist

[Mark Galassi <rosalia@cygnus.com>]

    James> the checkout, autogen, build, and cvs all worked great by
    James> the way!  i didn't build everything (which is a further
    James> tribute to the modularity of this package), but what i did
    James> build went without a hitch.

Excellent!

    James> interface.  i'm not sure i'll always be this disciplined,
    James> but when adding a new routine to gsl, i try to be generous
    James> with comments, but mostly i try to have a reference that i
    James> can cite, so the algorithm is less of a black box.

That is very important.  In some cases it is maybe better to not use a
source in the first place, but rather develop the details of the
algorithm from scratch.

For example in the case of numerical recipes where they agressively
enforce their copyright (even unreasonably) and their algorithms are
frequently expressed as C or FORTRAN code.  It's a pity Knuth didn't
cover the whole numerical field :-)

    James> my vision of gsl is not so much a comprehensive math
    James> library (though it is rapidly heading in that direction, to
    James> the credit of its developers) as a place to go to get some
    James> good numerical source code, unencumbered by restrictive
    James> copyright, which can then be modified to the particular
    James> project you are working on.

That is the original motivation, but Brian also suggested way back
that GSL should also be a ready-to-drop-in package for free
mathematical software so that they can shed the maintainance burden
onto us.  Just a couple of days ago someone wrote to tell me that the
Octave team is seriously considering putting GSL into Octave
(presumably replacing some of their infrastructure).

    James> i'm sure by now mark galassi is the only one who'll have
    James> read this far, so one last note: the old cvs repository for
    James> gsl at LANL is still active (or at least the
    James> /n/projects/cvs/gsl directory is still there).  now that
    James> the transition to sourceware.cygnus seems to be complete,
    James> is there any reason to keep the old one around?

I'll get to removing the old repository at some point :-)