Re: best policies for third party Debian packaging and get-orig-source target
Hi Faheem,
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 06:41:59PM +0000, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> >
> > The mailing list archive shows that in 2008 you had contributed to the a
> > plink related thread - so you might know the Debian Med project. In
> > case you are unsure you might probably want to have a look at the list
> > of packages which definitely fall into your field on our web
> > sentinel[1]. If you want to have your package inside Debian (which
> > includes a lot of advantages starting from QA means until finally get
> > your publication listed on our web sentinel) you should move this thread
> > to Debian Med mailing list and we could talk about details there. I
> > personally can not see any advantage for you to create private packages
> > if you can have publicly available ones.
>
> I also exchanged some emails with Debian-Med developers (including
> yourself) in January regarding MEME.
Ahh, sorry for my bad memory - but since you are saying this I remember
for sure the MEME discussion.
> Additionally, I wrote on June 7th
> asking if the project wanted any help with the ggplot2 package, which
> was out of date, and asking to be added to the Project Member
> List. (I'm faheem-guest on alioth.) I did not get a reply to this
> message.
That's a bit sad and definitely not the usual way we are dealing with
requests. The savest way is to use the alioth interface to ask for
membership but at least now you are member of Debian Med
> I'm a little puzzled why ggplot2 is being packaged by Debian
> Med. It is a general purpose R graphing package.
If nobody else is packaging preconditions we are simply doing it
in our own Vcs. And this is just a precondition:
$ apt-cache rdepends r-cran-ggplot2
r-cran-ggplot2
Reverse Depends:
r-bioc-cummerbund
And you are right - it is not uploaded yet which is most probably
due to the fact that Charles is quite occupied since some time.
What I currently can see from the status in Git the preparation for
the latest upstream is done but the Build-Depends r-cran-scales is
just missing. It is waiting in
http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
since one month when Charles has uploaded this package. So we can hope
that it will be accepted soonish so r-cran-ggplot2 will follow.
> I certainly have no objection to my package being in
> Debian. Regardless of whether Debian Med considers it worthy of
> inclusion, I'd certainly appreciate any feedback on the package from
> people who probably know far more about such things than I do.
OK.
> I'm in the process of reworking my repos so I can make it public. When
> I have done so I'll post the repos location to Debian Med, and then
> you (the Debian Med developers) can decide if you have any interest in
> the software.
We can also work on preconditions for your package - you mentioned that
there are some R packages missing.
> In the meantime, I'd still appreciate feedback on the general issues I
> originally posted about in this thread.
I think you mean the way you should create the private package? I'd
recommend applying the very same rules as for any other Debian package.
You are welcome to do the development in Debian Med Git / SVN at your
preference (as I said you now have commit permissions). The rules
are explained in our group policy[1].
> >> The software uses SQL (PostgreSQL), Python, R and C++, so it is a bit
> >> of a hotchpotch, and while a small package, it has a large number of
> >> dependencies. Unfortunately the R packages I use are not all in
> >> Debian, last I checked.
> >
> > So why not changing at least the availablity of the preconditions?
>
> I'm not sure what you mean.
You wrote: "Unfortunately the R packages I use are not all in Debian" -
so lets try to get those packages you need in. As you see we are taking
also quite general packages if they are preconditions. The rationale is
simply that there is no such thing like an R packaging team (which is a
shame but we need to cope with this).
> > Looking forward to help you solving your packaging problem in Debian Med
> > team.
>
> Thank you again for your interest.
:-)
BTW, please do us a favour and if you somehow feel ignored (for instance
by failing to accept your alioth membership request) please ping again.
That's usually not the way we deal with newcomers and it should not
happen again - but pinging somehow helps specifically it seems that it
were in a quite busy time with release preparations, Debian Med sprint
etc. So sorry if something did not went as smooth as you would have
expected.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
--
http://fam-tille.de
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