Some progress about the packaging of nextflow

[Pierre Gruet <pgt@debian.org>]

Dear all,


Those last weeks I spent quite a lot of time pushing forward the 
packaging of nextflow. I wrote a few patches and pushed 5 dependencies 
into NEW.


Now there remains quite a lot to do.

The biggest tasks would be to package the SDK of AWS [0] (which would 
also benefit igv) and of Microsoft Azure [1]. We would also need to 
package Apache Ignite [2].
After the freeze I shall discuss this on the ML of the Debian Java team. 
I cannot really figure out how hard packaging those whole SDK would be. 
I also have a poor idea of the maintenance burden over time.

[0] https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java
[1] https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-java
[2] https://github.com/apache/ignite/

Yet nextflow only relies on those in its plugins, maybe it can be built 
and packaged without them, to begin with.
*@Steffen*: do you think it is worth having nextflow in Debian if the 
plugins related to Amazon, Azure and Ignite are not inside?


Also, we would need to upgrade the dependency libkryo-java, of which 
version 2.20 is currently in Debian. Yet there were lot of ABI changes 
between version 2.20 and current upstream version 5.1.1, and even today 
gradle depends on a version before the ABI changes. So maybe it should 
be worth introducing a new package, say libkryo5-java, so that gradle 
still relies on libkryo-java but nextflow can depend on libkryo5-java. I 
shall also discuss this on the Debian Java ML after the release.

If anyone here has some experience with the Amazon or Azure SDK, please 
kindly share it as I am willing to determine if packaging them is feasible.

Best wishes,

--
Pierre