Re: [Debian-med-packaging] Someone prepared to package GAMGI (molecular visualisation and editing)
[Moved the discussion to the main Debian-Med mailing list.]
Dear all,
I tried the preliminary Debian package for gamgi (http://www.gamgi.org/)
today, and I realised that it needs the gtkglarea5 pakcage, that
provides the GtkGLArea library. Unfortunately, this library depends on
GTK 1.2, which is not supported anymore (see
http://www.gtk.org/documentation-old.html). Because of this lack of
support, Debian is in the process of removing all packages that need
gtk-1.2. To make things worse, the gtkglarea5 package in Debian seems
almost abandonned since 2003, and the GtkGLArea library itself is in a
critical stage, because it was abandonned for a long time, and its major
update is not yet released (see http://www.mono-project.com/GtkGLArea).
It is possible that our pakcage will be refused in the Debian main
archive because of these issues.
This said, since we already did most of the packaging work, I think that
we can provide the package unofficially so that it can be distributed on
http://www.gamgi.org/.
For the environment variables, we have a policy in Debian that we set
them through the use of a wrapper if they are necessary for the program
to work correctly.
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.9 If we want
the choices of the users to be preserved, we would have to write a
wrapper accordingly. I usually prefer to hardcode default values in the
program directly. After all, since the program and its doc will be
installed through a package, file locations can be known in advance.
Would it be possible to do this with gamgi ?
To better integrate gamgi in desktop environments, I will add an entry
for it in the Debian and FreeDesktop menus. Can you suggest an icon ?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wakō, Saitama, Japan
Reply to: