at Debian Reunion Hamburg I had a
discussion about the main blocking points in properly
packaging tensorflow.
One of these was that bazel-bootstrap in Debian is very
outdated.
Yes, it is.
There is a fairly trivial packaging change [1] which unfortunately
blocks all future packaging work. That change has been sitting in
NEW for over a year. I have no idea why. I have reached out to the
FTP Team numerous times both by email and on IRC and never received
a response, much less an explanation. Given all the work that I've
put into this project, that is extraordinarily demoralizing, to say
the least. It has also completely destroyed the great momentum that
the Bazel packaging effort initially had.
I just don't have the energy to keep trying to have a conversation
with a brick wall. If you happen to know someone on that team and
can get any information about what's going on over there, that would
be rather helpful.
There have been attempts by Jesse Chan (in
CC) to package bazel 4.x but these have never integrated.
Correct. I was going to merge those changes once we were able to
build a -source package. (The change implemented in [1])
Having not even 4.0 packaged makes the
whole attempt questionable as all bazel based projects (at
least I know of) require at least bazel 4.
Maybe one of you could loose a couple of
words on what is blocking us.
See my explanation above. Also, as a point of clarification,
bazel-bootstrap is a very hacked package and not sustainable. The
goal [2] is to replace it once the Bazel ecosystem can successfully
build itself within Debian. Before the fiasco with NEW, we had hoped
to use bazel-bootstrap to allow a bazel-4 package to be built along
with all of its dependencies. We would have created a bazel-5
package once that version was stable and (likely) maintained all
stable Bazel versions to allow maximum flexibility for dependencies
such as TensorFlow.
At this point I don't know when, or if, any of that will happen.
BTW: there are two mailing-lists. For me it
looks like the more recent one is the list at
lists.debian.org, but the control file still points to the
launchpad list.
Correct. We use the launchpad list for packaging notifications and
the l.d.o list for project coordination. [2]