State of external contributions and collaborations

[LecrisUT]

Hi @karypis, trying again to reach out to you about how open you are to external contributions, what communication channels we can use, etc.

There are various things that the community has offered to help with, and recently there is a renewed interest to update the Fedora packages of this and METIS, bringing some more contributors and eyes on the project. As a Fedora packager, there are a few things that we would like your collaboration on fixing (primarily your review and merge, most of the leg-work can be done by us):

• License clarification License type #30. The true license of the project is not Apache-2.0 because there are snippets that are licensed and copyrighted by other authors. Additionally your LICENSE.txt is not the correct license file for Apache-2.0, just the license header. You may put that in a COPYING file instead, or use a modern tool like REUSE
• CMake fixes:
  • Properly use GNUInstallDirs variables all across
  • Support importing PCRE (or better PCRE2) from find_package or equivalent
  • Avoid hard-coding compiler flags unless really sure you want it and there are no CMake intrinsics. Please use CMake presets instead for development needs

These are mostly the minimum essentials to unblock the Fedora packaging efforts