VMD and "Debian source only" packages
Hello,
I was proposing as a Google Summer of Code project to experiment about extending our blends infrastructure towards those packages
that are not DFSG free and that are not even redistributable, but that may be compiled locally with a happy upstream when there
are patches coming in. Such "everything goes through us" kind of licenses are not ultimately nice. But must admit that I find such
not so bad either. At least they adhere to scientific principles to have everything inspectable on source level and they do not
come with any fee. So, as a scientist I want to embrace them. And Debian Med is about science for some good part of it.
The GSoC student shall find out if there is some decent way to share experiences on how to package such software through our
distribution. We cannot ship the binary. And we cannot ship the source code. It may be a strange thought at first, but please feel
reminded that many research groups have every Open Source software they use for production compiled from source - they would not
use our binaries in the first place. So why should we then not just offer to share our build experience alone:
* a folder in our SCM
* a watch file to get upstream's source code
* the rest of debian/* to get it built
For this all we could most likely extend the task list somehow to have the package listed. And then I felt reminded about the
problem how to get arbitrary data downloaded and post-processed: maybe there should be a build tool that reads our task list and
knows how to get the build started.
I have now just completed a first packaging of VMD. There is some problem with the plugins, and it is rather minimalistic for the
very moment (no CUDA, pthreads, etc.) but otherwise I presume it to be functional. Rosetta would be the next on this list, which I
would like to leave for the GSoC student. Please come up with whatever further ideas and comments you may have on this.
Many greetings
Steffen
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