[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: invitation for you and your packages to join the pkg-perl team




Hi Dominic:

My apologies for the top-post and for the length of my response.

Frankly, I was part of the debian-perl group some time ago but once the RCS was transitioned to git, I fell away since we tend to use svn in my research group and I am not a full-time programmer but a physics professor.

As time has passed, the application which uses libchemistry-formula-perl, horae, has undergone a major transition to a version which uses many more perl modules, some of which are not in the Debian archive. Furthermore, it is becoming possible to have this program be part of the main archive since it no longer requires non-free pgplot5 to produce graphics. I am hoping to have the time to be able to package this new perl program but at a minimum (not including building the documentation) it does require some additional modules not yet in Debian. Specifically,

Encoding::FixLatin
File::Monitor::Lite
Mooseex::Types::Laxnum
Pod::ProjectDocs

I have used dh-make-perl to make trial packages for a local installation but having these in the Debian archive would be great and make it possible for me to use my very limited time to focus on the main application, which is large and complex to package.

In any case, I would be more than happy to transfer ownership of libchemistry-formula-perl and all of the to the pkg-perl team if I could get the author, Bruce Ravel, to put it on CPAN as a separate module. The author of the big analysis program has a tendency to embed the Perl modules he writes in his main tarball. I have been unable to convince him otherwise and I ended up pulling a few of them out as separate packages when I first put horae in the Debian archive because I thought they might have the most general utility. The fact that they are not in CPAN makes them of little interest to the broader Perl community, however. The sam applies to three other packages which are already being maintained by the pkg-perl team:

libxray-absorption-perl
libxray-scattering-perl
libxray-spacegroup-perl

This approach has become more complicated with the newest version of Bruce's program, called demeter. He now has many more small Perl modules which get installed with the main program and I am not sure that it is a good idea to break them all out. It might be wiser to remove libchemistry-formula-perl, and the other three above, from the archive since it only has a reverse dependency on horae, which will be replaced by the new program called demeter in the future.

Honestly, I am more than happy to hear from the pkg-perl team about what the best path forward might be. Making lots of tiny perl module packages out of this massive tarball does not seem to be the best approach and I really have little time to spend on packaging these days with my larger administrative load.

Carlo

On Sun, 20 Aug 2017, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:

Dear Carlo,

In the Debian Perl team, we have been looking at perl module packages
which are not team maintained and considering whether the lives of
these packages can be made better (for example, by reducing the overhead
and increasing the consistency of that packaging), by suggesting that
they be moved to the pkg-perl team.


...snip...


Your lib*-perl packages are listed below for reference:

libchemistry-formula-perl

Thanks for your work in maintaining the Debian Perl ecosystem!

Best wishes
Dominic.
on behalf of the Debian Perl Team


--
Carlo U. Segre -- Duchossois Leadership Professor of Physics
Interim Chair, Department of Chemistry
Director, Center for Synchrotron Radiation Research and Instrumentation
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498            Fax: 312.567.3494
segre@iit.edu   http://phys.iit.edu/~segre   segre@debian.org


Reply to: