Re: advice/help needed for including new software in debian (science)
Hi Felipe,
thanks for your interest in Debian Science.
On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 06:29:32AM -0200, Felipe Figueiredo wrote:
> I have developed two scientific simulators of biological interest
> [1,2], and want to include them in Debian.
Cool - I think you did the right step to ask on a team list. While
Debian Science is perfectly fine we deal with (micro-)biology basically
inside the Debian Med team. I'm not fully sure whether MMRRSim[1] fits
that medical scope so well but I'm pretty sure about TRepid[2].
> As a former Debian user
> (currently using Ubuntu), and an avid FOSS supporter I want to make
> sure they get the deserved treatment getting included in major
> distributions, starting with Debian. I will focus for now in MMRRSim
> [2].
>
> I admit the packaging literature is almost beyond me, and it took a
> while before I got the basics. I managed to get [2] working enough to
> build with debuild, with no major lintian warnings, and published to a
> PPA [3]. Code is managed using the bzr VCS, and from what I gather,
> good practices indicate I should provide a "pure tarball" branch [4],
> and a separate branch for packaging [5]. Being pure Perl applications,
> the initial packaging was facilitated by dh-make-perl [6].
>
> Since I now have a basic working setup, I need some experienced eyes
> to scrutinize what may be missing in terms of policy, licensing (I am
> thinling GPL, but am open for other suggestions), and pointers to
> whatever else I need to get this child accepted into Debian school. I
> greatly appreciate any advice given, and look forward to participating
> in Debian!
I'd recommend having a look into the Debian Med team policy document [0]
because I have the strong feeling that most of your questions are
answered. Yes, it is correct that you should provide some downloadable
versioned tarball of your software and if you do not mind using Git
rather than bzr (well, we need to restrict the number of VCS somehow to
make sure not every team member needs to become a "various VCS expert")
you can commit your debian/ packaging to the Debian Med team Git (or SVN
if you prefer this). Everything is verbosely written down[0] - feel free
to contact us on the list in case there might be some open questions
remaining.
Kind regards and thanks for providing these programs as Free Software
Andreas.
[0] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
> 1. https://launchpad.net/mmrrsim
> 2. https://launchpad.net/trepid
> 3. https://launchpad.net/~mmrrsim-developers/+archive/mmrrsim
> 4. https://code.launchpad.net/~philsf/mmrrsim/trunk
> 5. https://code.launchpad.net/~philsf/mmrrsim/mmrrsim-deb
> 6. http://packages.debian.org/dh-make-perl
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