Hi Anton,Thank you for taking the time to look at this package! I'll try to address all your questions below.
I've signed up as a maintainer in the debian-science team, and will push the package to their git repository shortly. I've changed the Section to 'math' instead of 'libs', to follow the debian-science policy.
In regard to the other scientific-oriented packages on the upstream website, I don't have any immediate plans to package them. There are a couple of obstacles I would have to deal with first: 1) There is no upstream version control (or even a version number). Each "package" consists of a single source file (and header file), that may be periodically updated on the website. For quadrule, I went up one level to the directory listing, and used the modification date as a "version" number. I can periodically check this modification date to see if a new "version" is available, and do a diff to ascertain what the changes are. However, I would not want to do this for a few dozen independent packages! 2) I don't have enough time available to properly test all these packages. I would just be turning a crank to produce an autotools build, followed by a Debian package. I would need help to verify that the software actually works, and to produce relevant documentation. Having said that, I would be more than willing to help with the packaging for these other upstream libraries if there was interest in having them.
In regard to your technical questions:1) The 'build-aux' directory is defined by 'AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR' in configure.ac. This was suggested in the GNU Autotools tutorial (http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~adl/autotools.html), which I used as a reference when creating my configuration file. AFAIK, it contains helper scripts for the build process, which are auto-generated with 'autoreconf --install'.
Items (2)-(8) have been addressed in the latest package on the mentors site. I also had to modify the *.install files when switching to compat level 9, as this triggered multi-arch library paths.
(9) I added the symbols-file because it was suggested in The Debian New Maintainers' Guide http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/advanced.en.html#librarysymbols . It can be removed if necessary.
I've addressed some of the lintian warnings, such as hyphen-used-as-minus-sign in the man page. There are a couple of lingering warnings that I can't address: - no-upstream-changelog: There is no upstream changelog! All I have to work with is a C source file and a header file. - shlib-calls-exit: The C functions will call exit() if there's an error, which is not what you would expect in a shared library. It would be ideal if they returned an integer error code to the caller, but they're all defined as void type. I could patch them up to return ints and never exit(), but then I would be changing the API of the upstream source. I'm not sure what the best course of action is here.
Cheers, Mike On 13-04-11 04:58 PM, Anton Gladky wrote:
Hi Mike, thanks for providing a new package for Debian! But I have some notes/questions about your package. First of all I would like to propose you to maintain your package under the debian-science team [1], which I think the most suitable team for such kind of software. You created an autotools-build for the c-file, which is provided by upstream. There are also a lot of other scientific-oriented packages [2]. Are there any plans to package them as well? If yes, will it be different packages, or they will be integrated into one "meta-package"? Some technical questions: 1) there is a folder in the source "build-aux". What is it for? 2) use compat level 9. 3) quilt is not needed in Build-Depends sections. 4) use DEP-5 for debian/copyright. 5) remove docs-file, it is empty. 6) remove libquadrule-dev,dirs and libquadrule1,dirs. They are useless. 7) la-files should not be installed at all. 8) clean debian/rules. It should be 3 lines long in your case. 9) I am not sure about symbols-file, whether it is necessary to provide it explicitly. After you build a binary, please, start "lintian -IE --pedantic" over your .changes files. You will get some warnings and errors, which need to be fixed as well. Cheers, Anton [1] http://debian-science.alioth.debian.org/debian-science-policy.html [2] http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/c_src/quadrule/quadrule.html On 04/02/2013 11:48 PM, Mike Neish wrote:Package: sponsorship-requests Severity: wishlist Dear mentors, I am looking for a sponsor for my package "quadrule" Package name : quadrule Version : 0~20121001-1 Upstream Author : John Burkardt <jburkardt@fsu.edu> URL : http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/c_src/quadrule/quadrule.html License : LGPL3 Section : libs It builds those binary packages: libquadrule-dev - Development files for quadrule libquadrule1 - A variety of quadrature rules To access further information about this package, please visit the following URL: http://mentors.debian.net/package/quadrule Alternatively, one can download the package with dget using this command: dget -x http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/q/quadrule/quadrule_0~20121001-1.dsc More information about quadrule can be obtained from http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/~neishm/quadrule/quadrule.html. Changes since the last upload: quadrule (0~20121001-1) unstable; urgency=low . * Initial release (Closes: #704151) Regards, Mike Neish