RFS: Geant 4
Hi,
I'm looking for a sponsor for Geant4, a physics simulation toolkit developed from CERN. It can be used for simulating particle accelerators, medical devices and more. Be warned: compiling Geant4 and running lintian on it can take a while.
Geant4 is quite big, and there are some caveats to Debian packaging, so let me quickly go through some of them. First of all, Geant4 is split into lots of libraries, but they don't act like classic shared libraries. It doesn't make sense to give them soversions and split them into separate packages, because they kinda all depend on each other. To simplify the life of everyone that might want to use this, I created a single package, including the libs and all development headers (the documentation and the Python module are still in a separate package though). The idea behind this is that applications using Geant4 don't belong into Debian anyway, Geant4 is basically only used to develop and execute very specific simulations, not as a typical general purpose shared library.
But just packaging the code isn't enough. Geant4 heavily relies on some datasets, which are separate downloads. I tried to include them into the (code) source tarball, but that makes building just a nightmare. The data is 1.5 GB in size, and thus I put it in a separate source package. The version of this source package is kinda random, since the datasets have their own versions, but it just doens't make sense to do a separate source tarball for any of them, since they only get updated with a new Geant4 release anyway.
The Geant4 repository is here: https://salsa.debian.org/stephanlachnit/geant4
On Mentors: https://mentors.debian.net/package/geant4/ (10.6.3 should land soon)
It should be moved to the science-team salsa namespace, which I can't do.
The geant4-data repository is here: https://salsa.debian.org/stephanlachnit/geant4-data
It should be moved to the science-team salsa namespace as well.
Note that the geant4-data package is not on Mentors, simply because my internet connection is just to slow to upload it, it already took me ages to get it onto Salsa. The version is one patch behind Geant4 (10.6.2 vs 10.6.3), but nothing changed with that patch so it's fine.
Cheers,
Stephan
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