[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Build-dependency for rasmol: cbflib



On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Teemu Ikonen wrote:

Group maintenance would be ok, but as mentioned in the ITP (#467655),
I'm not a big fan of maintaining patch stacks under debian/.

Well the URL you quotet there[1] inspired myself to start a discussion
at debian-devel[2].  This initial mail leaded to a longish discussion
and is not yet finished.  Moreover the opinions diverged heavily so
there is for the moment to change the policy we once defined for the
Debian-Med project.  I would not say that we are doing "The Right
Thing" (TM) but there is no hard evidence that we are doing something
terribly wrong.  So for the moment there is no real need to change
what we considered useful for those people who are working in the
Debian-Med team.  (It took in fact some time until I was really
convinced to start using a patch system and learning quilt was finally
quite easy thanks to Davids policy document. ;-))

I will
look into the merge mode in svn-buildpackage and see if I can
integrate it to my workflow easily, but this will take some time.

I'm sure that people here on this list are more than willing
to answer your questions if you have some specific problem.

Policy 8.3 gives three reasons for making static-only libraries.
CBFlib scores two out of these three, namely

* libraries whose interfaces are in flux or under development
(commonly the case when the library's major version number is zero, or
where the ABI breaks across patchlevels)

* libraries which are explicitly intended to be available only in
static form by their upstream author(s)

I think the earliest time to start thinking about CBFlib shared
libraries is when there's another package besides Rasmol in Debian
depending on it.

Well, I agree for you that durrently there is no visible reason
to build a dynamic library.  I just learned over the years that
users allways will ask for such a functionality - even if you
never thought it might be possible.  Do finally you are the
maintainer (well, the ITP is yours - and I would like to spend
my time currently with other things) and so you decide.  I just
wanted to give you reasons to think twice about it.

   2. I see large chunks of documentation in the source package
      but no separate doc package.  I would strongly advise to
      build a separate doc package.

Ok, I'll revise the package soonish.

That's fine.  In this case I have a stronger opinion than in the
library issue (where I wrote "you should probably" - here it is
"strongly advise").

 BTW, did rasmol upstream accepted your GTK version?

Yes, the code is in the CVS, but maybe not in the next release.

Grmpf, I would like to have this settled down.  Thanks for supporting
upstream anyway!

Kind regards and thanks for your work on this

        Andreas.


[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/dpatch_dbs_etc_etc_etc_etc_considered_harmful/
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/01/msg00837.html
--
http://fam-tille.de


Reply to: