Re: Packaging of FSL for Debian
On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Michael Hanke wrote:
Packaging is quite difficult, since the source tarball contains a lot of
different libraries and programs. Some of them are already available as
separate packages in Debian.
I would remove any separately available software from the source tarball and
ask the authors to follow this policy. I often observed that authors of medical
software tend to include certain (mostly outdated and not security maintained)
versions of Free Software directly in their tarball. The usual argument is
that they want to make sure that it really works with their software. But
this is a quite weak argument which just tries to hide that they are not really
able to maintain their own code properly.
So if I where you I would start with an analysis of their source tree and
make a list of "simply included" software packages. Once this is done
tag this list with
1) inside Debian
2) inofficial packages
3) not yet packaged
Lets work out a plan how we could cope with 2) and 3) to solve the preconditions
first. Once this is done we were either able to convince upstream to provide
a clean tarball or we should strip down it to our own usefull orig.tar.gz. Often
it makes some good impression if you provide upstream with an autoconf/automake
patch which just verifies the existance of the libraries they need. (See above
about unability to maintain own code - automake might help them ...)
Moreover there are unclear licensing issues. Most of the code is under some
kind of non-commercial license
( http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fsl/licence.html ). While some other parts
are GPL'ed. And there seems to be no sharp edge between those licences.
I'm no license expert but debian-legal might be helpful in case of questions ...
And there is another issue: FSL needs AFNI ( http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/afni/ ).
I know of some unofficial Debian packages of AFNI
( http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=61662 ), but I would
really like to have them in Debian officially. Which should be no problem,
since AFNI is completely GPL'ed.
So why not asking the packager whether he wants his package sponsored to
the official mirror? The advantages should be obvious. If it is medicine
related I'm willing to serve as a sponsor. (I'm guessing from the sheer size
of the deb at the location you posted that I will ask for splitting this
package up into a multi-binary, but we can sort this out once the author is
willing to cooperate.) Other DDs are welcome to take over sponsoring jobs.
BTW, I think I should ask the maintainers sponsored by me to include me
in the Uploaders field. I'm starting to loose the overview about the
packages sponsored by me and once I'm in the uploaders field the PTS lists
all these packages including their bugs. But I'll sort this out on a
per packages basis with my sponsees.
I know there there was a discussion some time ago about making official AFNI
packages ( http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2004/10/msg00022.html ).
If I parse this right it is about DCMTK which is now an official Debian package.
There is no string "afni" in this posting. But a mail following in this
thread
http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2004/10/msg00030.html
is just mentioning it.
Did that made any progress?
Nothing I would know of. If nobody cares (wants to use it) nothing will
happen. If there is a user who has interest, mostly something reasonable
happens.
So far from me. I would like to here your comments.
Thanks for your input
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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