Re: .py endings or no .py endings for scientific packages
On 6/16/18 2:59 AM, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Le Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at 03:52:08PM +0100, Tony Travis a écrit :
>> I use Debian-Med packages every day for my scientific work and I really
>> appreciate the hard work that the Debian-Med team have done to make this
>> software available via the Debian Sid repositories that Ubuntu is based
>> on, but I dislike the dogma about issues like removing .py suffixes and
>> the 'technical committee' dictating to me or you how we should work...
> Hi Tony,
>
> In retrospect, my wording was quite unfortunate and unfair to the
> technical committee, which has evolved a lot in the recent years. I am
> sorry for this.
>
> Unless there are strong objections, I propose that we (the Debian Med
> project) collectively ask the Policy maintainers to at least soften the
> recommendation to rename upstream scripts, and to ask to the technical
> committee to resolve the dispute if the discussion becomes unproductive.
>
> Actually, this has been discussed some years ago already, so we do not
> need to over-redo the discussion again. One of the reasons why I did
> not go for the TC at that time is that I had the impression that too
> many of its members would vote against us. However, most seats have
> been rotated now...
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=190753
>
> On our side, the main arguments for not renaming the scripts is that it
> makes us incompatible with upstream. Am I missing any other major point?
>
> Have a nice week-end,
Hi Charles,
I was not aware of that thread. It is always a problem when everyone
means well. You had indeed some prominent Debian figures speaking
out against a relaxation.
Concerning your question about the main argument I would formulate
it differently. We become incompatible with our office mates.
In a recent email exchange with Chris I had explained the situation
with downstream packages depending on those .py files and he just
suggested to properly override the lintian warning with an explanation.
I found that a very reasonable thing to do.
How about a paragraph in the Debian Med policy? Maybe like
"Many packages created for scientific purposes have executables with
language-characteristic suffices like .pl or .py. This is not appropriate
for public interfaces of a software that should be implementation-agnostic.
It is a Debian Policy requirement to correct this for packages uploaded
to the main distribution. Such distribution-specific changes however
are discouraging the exchange of protocols between scientists. The
package maintainer is encouraged to work with upstream to correct
the naming of these files, but may decide to locally only override
the lintian warning for the time upstream needs to distribute a corrected
version of their software."
Best,
Steffen
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