Pakaging Staden for Debian

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

Hi James,

a colleague of mine who is working as myself at the German
Robert Koch Institute would like to use Gap4 from the Staden
package.  Beeing a Debian developer like Tim (whom I met at
Debian Conference in Edinburgh) and caring for microbiological
software in the scope of the Debian-Med project
  http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/microbio
I would like do it "the Debian way" and provide real Debian
packages from this great and important project.

When I tried to build the package I was hit by several problems
that are caused by the fact that you relay on certain libraries
beeing in the source path instead provided at usual places where
Linux distributions normally provide this stuff.  I was able
to circumvent this by certain patches but I stumbled uppon an
issue that is not consistent in documentation and code.

README.build says Staden would need
  * itcl          (tested with 3.2.1)
but the file src/mk/global.mk says

   ITCLSRC         = $(SRCROOT)/incrTcl-3.3cvs/itcl/generic
   ITKSRC          = $(SRCROOT)/incrTcl-3.3cvs/itk/generic
   ITCLVERS        = 3.3
   ITKVERS         = 3.3

which seems to be a clear reference to the not yet released CVS
release of ITCL (which by the way does not seem to be actively
developed any more).  So I wonder what is the reason for this
discrepancy.  If Staden would really need itcl 3.3cvs I would be
in trouble because it is not yet packaged for Debian (and I have
no idea how good are the chances that it will be available soon).
In case it would be a simple patch to version 3.2 I could probably
ask the Debian maintainer of this package to apply it to the
stable version.

Moreover I wonder what might be the sense of the separately
provided tarball of io_lib.  For some purpose this lib would
separately solve some of our problems here, but it is confusing
to have different versions around - one bundled in Staden and
one separately.  If you ask me, it would be a good idea to
provise io_lib only separately and give according hints in
the Staden build instructions.  (Meta-hint: I think using a
generic name like io_lib is a very good idea because it
is kind of specific io that is done by this lib and files
like libread and libmisc are also not really good names to
prevent name space pollution.)

Further questions are: Are you able, interested and willing to work
together with the Debian-Med people to get Staden packaged for
Debian?  We would like to make the work of people working in
microbiology as easy as possible and perhaps making Staden more
popular in the Free Software world.  This might increase the
chance to get some co-developers for continue the work on
Staden.

Kind regards and thanks for your fine work on Staden

        Andreas.

--
http://fam-tille.de