Intent to package: Malaga
http://www.linguistik.uni-erlangen.de/Malaga.en.html
Malaga is "a system for automatic language analysis", an
implementation of the left-associative grammar formalism. Its main
application is research on computer linguistics and development of
programs that need some serious analysis of natural language - a fancy
Doctor toy would be a good example. It has also been used as a
teaching tool by Department of Computational Linguistics at the
University of Erlangen, where the program was developed by Björn
Beutel and Gerald Schüller.
Starting from version 4.2, Malaga is distributed under the GNU GPL.
It seems that this move from the previous non-free license was
triggered by my complaint earlier this year.
I have Malaga compiled (with minor necessary modifications) on my own
machine and it runs fine. Now I am going to package it. I am not yet
a Debian developer, so I'll send my application in within a week.
Any comments this far?
***
There are some technical and Debian policy points I wish to get
clarified.
1) How to distribute Malaga between binary packages?
Malaga consists of a set of standalone programs, a library, and some
miscellanea. They all can function without the others (except for
some of the miscellanea; they need the programs). I'd personally put
them all into one .deb. However, the Policy manual implies (§ 3.3.3)
that I must create at least two packages, one containing a shared
version and the other a static version of the library. This is fine:
I can create libmalaga4.2 and libmalaga4.2-dev easily. What should I
do about the standalone programs (which do not currently use the
library, BTW, although they share many modules witht it)? Create a
separate binary package for them, the documentation and the
miscellanea?
2) Which section and priority?
I'd like to put Malaga (at least the standalone programs) into a
Science section. However, no such beast yet exists. Math, which
contains many scientific packages, does not sound right, as this is a
linguistic package. Misc is the one I am currently considering. If I
go with the three packages option described above, I'd have the
packages like this:
malaga (standalone programs and miscellanea): misc (science, when it exists)
libmalaga4.2 (shared library): libs
libmalaga4.2-dev (static library and header file): devel
Would this look OK?
Then the priority. The Policy Manual defines extra as follows: "This
contains packages that conflict with others with higher priorities, or
are only likely to be useful if you already know what they are or have
specialised requirements." I would think doing research on
linguistics or developing linguistically heavy programs qualifies as a
"specialised requirement". Therefore I'd have all Malaga packages be
"Priority: extra". Is this OK?
Antti-Juhani
--
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi> ** <URL:http://www.iki.fi/gaia/> **
All GNU users have more. Most of them have less.
Some of them have most.
Reply to: