Re: [Debian-med-packaging] Someone prepared to package GAMGI (molecular visualisation and editing)
Charles Plessy wrote:
[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.
I understand, I am sorry. I am planning to move GAMGI to Gtk 2.* (or Gtk
3.*), but this is not going to be a trivial task. I am the only
developer, and Gamgi has now probably something between 80 and 100 Gtk
dialogs.
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/.
Thank you
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 ?
I prefer the wrapper option because it is more general. I am affraid 10
different distributions will put these files in 10 different locations
and these locations tend to change often, between different releases.
The only issue I see with the wrapper is that the script should allow
users to launch gamgi from the command line with an arbitrary number of
files (this is the only command line option):
prompt> gamgi file_1.xml file_2.xml... file_n.xml
Having said that, I think it's ok to hardcode a small list of places to
search for these files, as long as these are fairly common places, used
in a wide range of distributions, that don't change often, perhaps even
vaguely suggested by LSB or FHS.
In Debian, what is the exact path to the BitStream Vera ttf files? what
would be the path to the gamgi doc/ directory that contains the Gamgi
help files?
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 ?
I am sorry, I don't have an icon... Certainly it should reseamble
atoms... I don't clear ideias about this, I guess it could be:
1) a G made of atoms, as in this nanostructure:
http://www.gamgi.org/screenshots/screenshot12_4.html
2) a G letter with a water molecule:
http://www.gamgi.org/gwater.png
3) the smallest aminoacid starting with a G letter (glycine):
http://www.gamgi.org/glycine.png
4) just a bunch of spheres together...
option 3) probably wins the cool factor, but does this sort of image
downscales well enough? are we talking about rasterized or vectorial SVG
icons?
Have a nice day,
Thank you,
Carlos
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