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Re: looking for sponsor - giac, computer algebra system



Carlos Enrique Carleos Artime <carleos@www.uica.info> schrieb:

> Many thanks for your review!
>
>> Have you read the new maintainers guide, and had a look at the
>> developers' reference?
>
> Yes, at least once.  But it's true that I should read them
> carefully these days...
>
>> I had a look at it, and there are some problems:
>> 
>> - The program is packaged as Debian native. This shouldn't be, it should
>>   have an orig.tar.gz and a diff.gz.
>
> Bernard (upstream author) expressed his intention of including the
> "debian" subdirectory in the upstream tree.  In fact, he maintains 
> deb packages of Giac for Quantian (a mathematical-oriented Knoppix
> derivate) but didn't have the time for a careful observation of
> Debian policies [I'm wondering wheter I have that time, myself]. 

You should. It's no problem to have a bug one time or the other, but
this will happen anyway because you miss something or misinterpret
it. If you know you won't be able to make it policy compliant in the
first place, you'll probably have a hard time finding a sponsor -
because then sponsoring essentially means being the maintainer
proper. Do you have plans to become a Debian Developer, by the way? 

> Note that Bernard's "debian/" and my "debian/" are not perfectly
> synchronized.

Which means that you _need_ to have a non-native package, irrespective
of whether you keep the directory in the orig.tar.gz or not. An other
reason is that you _need_ to have your own debian/changelog.

Probably this is the reason why giac.tgz from the given upstream ftp
server and your orig.tar.gz differ. This needs to be documented in
README.Debian. 

>> - debian/changelog has entries that don't sound very useful ["No
>>   original manpages" - this sentence no verb ;-)].
>
> Ok, I'll remove this.

Or reformulate it so that everybody can get the meaning.

>> - as for the rest, it is currently compiling, and since this seems to
>>   take quite long I'm sending this mail before it's finished.

You shouldn't install xcas if that only says "No GUI support, try cas
instead or recompile Giac". Also the manpage claims that there was a
GUI. In an other mail you wrote:

> its GUI (this one depends on libraries not packaged in Debian, and
> upstream preferred not to include those library sources along with
> "giac").

Why don't you package these libraries as well, as a separate package?

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie



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