On Wednesday, November 30, 2011 12:18:24 AM Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote: > Paul Elliott <pelliott <at> blackpatchpanel.com> writes: > > Thank You for looking at it. > > Sorry, only got a chance to look at over the weekend. Both packages are > looking good but I do have some questions. Why is the data in > /usr/share/libswe/users/ephe and not directly in /usr/share/libswe? Does > the library require it somehow? If not (and I doubt if it does) it should > be changed for aesthetic reasons IMO. Also is there anyway you can avoid > the dependency on libreoffice for converting the .doc files? > > If these issues cannot be resolved it isn't a huge deal. The package is > otherwise ready to go. The answer to your question is partly historical, partly reasons. I first worked with libswe, which means I was working with the source file from astrodienst swe_unix_src_1.77.00.tar.gz. One alternative I considered was to make this my pristine source and to make all my changes in the form of patches. But this file has a number of problems. 1) It has pre-built binaries that have to be thrown away. 2) It has some documentation with out the source of that documentation that is the pdf and html files. I had to get the source for the documentation from astrodienst's ftp site, together with a note from the author that the additional files are also under the license. I first worked on getting libswe working. swe_unix_src_1.77.00.tar.gz has a number of small data files that the end user would probably need, and because they were included in swe_unix_src_1.77.00.tar.gz they might be changed with the next release. So I decided to put these in the package swe-basic-data, associated with the same source package. That way if those files changed with the next release from astrodienst, I could change these at the same time. The files in swe-standard-data all come from astrodienst's ftp site. As far as I know astrodienst never put them in a tar ball. I made my own tarball for these files consisting of files from astrodienst ftp site+ license from astrodienst ftp site + autotools make files from me that could be used for packaging. This was done after the package libswe. The libswe package can be used without installed data if the end user provides his own data and points an environment variable at it. This is why libswe0 only recommends swe-basic-data, and swe-standard-data, but does not require it. Because the stuff in libswe is associated with an astrodienst tarball, it probably has a different "life-cycle" than the data in swe-standard-data. Anything in swe_unix_src_1.77.00.tar.gz could change in the next release from astrodienst. The people at astrodienst have said that the .se1 files will never become unusable. If there is ever a new file format, they will give it a new file name, so that old programs will continue to work. So the stuff in swe- standard-data will probably never have to change because of changes at astrodienst, but the stuff in the libswe packages might change with the next release. So I think it might be a good idea to keep this into separate packages. I thought for a long time about how to organize the .se1 type data into packages. Not every person absolutely needs all this data. Some one could argue it should be broken up into sub packages. I finally thought that disk space is becoming so cheap that the cost of installing it all is probably less than the cost of requiring people to think about and communicate about what data they wanted to install. Some times the end user and the administrator are not the same person. It would be one more opportunity for miscommunication. On the other hand, probably no one would want to install all of the innumerable asteroid files. So I left those out, except for those in the se1 files and one sample. If someone was putting an astrology web page server on a low memory device like a router, they might want to only install part of the data in swe- standard-data. The original libswe from astrodienst assumed all the data would be at: ".:/users/ephe2/:/users/ephe/" I knew this would be wrong for debian because most debian systems don't have a /users main directory. So I had to put in a patch to change this location to one that could be owned by the packages. But I wanted to keep the layout of the data parallel to the way it is laid out on the astrodienst ftp site. That way if someone grabs more data from astrodienst's ftp site to put it somewhere on a local site, they would have a natural place to put it. So my place was: ".:/usr/share/libswe/users/ephe2/:/usr/share/libswe/users/ephe/" I am not absolutely sure that all these decisions are perfect. I can change them if needed. Please tell me what you think. Thank You for helping me get the package into shape. -- Paul Elliott 1(512)837-1096 pelliott@BlackPatchPanel.com PMB 181, 11900 Metric Blvd Suite J http://www.free.blackpatchpanel.com/pme/ Austin TX 78758-3117
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