Re: Package available (was Re: Micro Manager)

[Mark Longair <mark-debianlists@longair.net>]

Hi Andreas,

Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> wrote:
[..]
> On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 09:06:46PM +0100, Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 5:14 PM, Mark Longair
>> <mark-debianlists@longair.net> wrote:
[...]
>> >  * I've tried as far as possible to replace components from Fiji
>> >   with dependencies on existing Debian packages.  However,
>> >   whenever developers update libraries in Fiji to versions that
>> >   are later than those packaged in Debian, I have to switch
>> >   back to creating a Fiji-specific version of that package.
>> >   This is the case, for example, with Weka, Jython, jfreechart
>> >   and commons-math.
>> 
>> Did you fill bug reports in debian bts for those issues ?
>
> It might be that it creates to much work for a single person like Mark
> to continuosely file bug reports.  I have no idea how frequently these
> dependencies are changing and in how far this really influences the
> usability of Fiji.  I'd personally say that I would be quite annoyed if
> I would continuosely be forced to adapt to new versions of software
> because these might change interfaces or whatever.
>
> However, if it turns out that we could spot some specific packages which
> are not appropriately maintained inside Debian we could try to take over
> team maintenance and take over responsibility on our own to make the
> package better usable for the purpose we want to finally approach:
> Making the best software for medical care available to our users right
> inside Debian.  So Mark, if you say: well, package A, B and C are
> usually OK, but package X and Y are constantly lagging behind what I
> would need for Fiji, please do not hesitate to pronounce this here.

In fact, when I checked these cases again, the problem here is
not that the right package versions don't exist in Debian, it's
that I was aiming to still support the last LTS release of
Ubuntu (10.04 Lucid Lynx), which in some cases only has very old
versions of the dependent packages.  I should probably just
build a separate version of the packages for Lucid.  :(

[..]
>> > packages it doesn't make sense that they should be built out of
>> > the Fiji source tree anyway (e.g. bio-formats, RSyntaxTextArea,
>> > AutoComplete) since they're generically useful libraries outside
>> > context of Fiji.
>> 
>> How many people are behind the fiji effort ? Are they mostly
>> debian-based system users ? Jumping in the debian-med effort is
>> relatively easy.
>
> Good questions.  We can not stress frequently enough that in the past it
> worked quite good to teach and help interested persons (upstream
> developers) to build packages and help them to get it finally to the
> official mirror.

There are about 10 core contributors to Fiji, who are mostly
Linux or Mac users.  (There are a couple who use Windows.)
However, all the developers work directly from git clones rather
than using the Debian-packaged versions.

Although the other developers are supportive of what I'm trying
to do, I think I'm the only person who is actively interested in
working on Debian packaging.

best regards,
mark