Re: RFS: trng

[Alessandro Ghedini <al3xbio@gmail.com>]

On Sun, May 08, 2011 at 04:31:06PM +0200, Torquil Macdonald Sørensen wrote:
> Hi all!

Hi,

> TRNG (Tina's Random Number Generator) is a very nice C++ parallel
> pseudo-random number generator library that I use within my MPICH2
> parallel computer programs on Debian Sid AMD64 on a dual-core
> computer. They use Monte Carlo methods, so quality random number
> generation is essential.
> 
> I'd like to maintain this very nice library as a Debian package, and
> for that I need upload sponsorship. Parallel computing is becoming
> more and more commonplace, and this is a very easy-to-use and
> high-quality parallel pseudo RNG, and is actively maintained
> upstream.
> 
> Some required details:
> 
> 1) Name of source package: trng. It will create the following binary
> Debian packages: libtrng4-0, libtrng-dev, libtrng-dbg, libtrng-doc.
> The doc-package contains a very comprehensive high-quality 128-page
> PDF manual.
> 
> 2) The license is BSD (3-clause)
> 
> 3) Short description:
> 
> Tina's (pseudo) Random Number Generator Library
> 
> 4) Long description (taken from the upstream TRNG description):
> 
> Tina's Random Number Generator Library (TRNG) is a state of
> the art C++ pseudo-random number generator library for
> sequential and parallel Monte Carlo simulations. Its design
> principles are based on a proposal for an extensible random
> number generator facility, that will be part of the random
> number generator facility of the forthcoming revision of
> the C++ standard.
> 
> 5) Can be obtained from:
> 
> http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/t/trng/
> 
> and is "lintian clean".
> 
> 6) Upstream URL: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/trng
> 
> 7) PDF manual URL, for those that want to take a peek before
> downloading the package: http://trng.berlios.de/trng.pdf

Few notes:
* debian/control:
  - The Vcs-* fields are commented. Remove them if you do not use any VCS
    for maintaining your package.
  - lintian warns (with -IE --pedantic options):
      
      I: trng source: binary-control-field-duplicates-source field 
      "section" in package libtrng4-0

      I: trng source: duplicate-short-description libtrng-dev libtrng4-0
      libtrng-doc libtrng-dbg

* debian/copyright:
  - Do you really need to license your debian/ work under the GPL-3.0
    license? Is (kind of) best practice to license the Debian-related stuff
    under the same license as upstream.
* debian/libtrng-dev.install
  - Please remove the "usr/lib/*.la" entry. *.la files removal was a 
    Squeeze release goal.
* debian/libtrng-doc.install:
  - Installing documentation/examples is better done using 
    dh_installdocs(1) and dh_installexamples(1).
* debian/rules:
  - The intial comments can be removed.
  - Your package Build-depends on autotools-dev but is not using it. Add
    "--with autotools-dev" to the "dh $@" line.
  - No need to override dh_auto_clean, just add the files you want to clean
    in the debian/clean file.
  - Why are you overriding dh_compress? According to Debian Policy,
    additional documentation should be compressed unless it's small. Let
    dh_compress decide wheter it is needed or not to compress it.
    (also, compressed pdf.gz files are supported by most pdf readers, hence
    there's no reason to not compress it)
* debian/libtrng4-0.symbols:
  - It may be a good idea to add a *.symbols [0] file for the libtrng4-0
    package. See dpkg-gensymbols(1) for more info.

That's all, but there may be something more that I overlooked.

Note that I am not a DD therefore I can't sponsor you package.

Cheers

[0] http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/ImprovedDpkgShlibdeps

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