Re: VMD and "Debian source only" packages
Hi,
I came across this post again when I had another look at VMD and googled
whether somebody else was intersted...
On Sat, Mar 05, 2011 at 05:03:39PM +0100, Steffen Möller wrote:
> I was proposing as a Google Summer of Code project to experiment about
> extending our blends infrastructure towards those packages that are
> not DFSG free and that are not even redistributable, but that may be
> compiled locally with a happy upstream when there are patches coming
> in. Such "everything goes through us" kind of licenses are not
> ultimately nice. But must admit that I find such not so bad either. At
> least they adhere to scientific principles to have everything
> inspectable on source level and they do not come with any fee. So, as
> a scientist I want to embrace them. And Debian Med is about science
> for some good part of it.
>
> The GSoC student shall find out if there is some decent way to share
> experiences on how to package such software through our distribution.
> We cannot ship the binary. And we cannot ship the source code. It may
> be a strange thought at first, but please feel reminded that many
> research groups have every Open Source software they use for
> production compiled from source - they would not use our binaries in
> the first place. So why should we then not just offer to share our
> build experience alone:
> * a folder in our SCM
> * a watch file to get upstream's source code
> * the rest of debian/* to get it built
>
> For this all we could most likely extend the task list somehow to have
> the package listed. And then I felt reminded about the problem how to
> get arbitrary data downloaded and post-processed: maybe there should
> be a build tool that reads our task list and
> knows how to get the build started.
I think this is a valid use-case. I once had the idea of something like
module-assistant, i.e. a curses tool which knows about all the modules,
eh source-only packages and lets the user compile&install them. Not
sure whether any code from module-assistant could be salvaged, though.
Michael
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