Report from Debian Med sprint

[Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>]

Hi,

as you might have noticed the Debian Med team has organised its second
sprint in Southport last weekend[1].  I would like to give a short
report about this from my personal perspective.  I added a short version
of my agenda to the Wiki page[2].


 1) Ensembl packaging specifically working on installation in unstable without any conflicts (=trying to solve libwww issue)
    One main item for this meeting on my agenda was fixing the Ensembl
    package to finally enable a migration from experimental to unstable.
    One of the big showstopers is #636923.  However, unfortunately the
    to persons who I urgently needed to discuss this topic did finally
    not attend and I was only able to determine, that the problem can
    be stripped down to the problematic package is actually
    liblwp-parallel-perl.  I'll try to keep on working on this.

 2) The Beast-mcmc[3] finishing
    This package is on my agenda since about one year and I was able to
    iron out nearly all included binary JAR files.  However I get struck
    on the last problematic JAR mtj.jar is a mess of other included JARs
    based on f2j blas/arbapck JARs.  I reached a state where I got a hint
    from upstream to the sources for the last JAR in this chain and I
    need to see whether I will be able to compile.  I'll give this a try
    in the next couple of weeks if not I will push the package to non-free
    first and leave the final freeing to some later point in time.
    As usual, any help is welcome.

 3) Continuing with current MoM[4]; presenting MoM to the audience to gather
    more potential students
    I kept on mentoring the student and there is further progress with the
    package we are focussing on.  Moreover it might be that some participants
    from the workshop might step in for later Monthes

 4) Finishing sofa-framework which needs to be updatet to new version
    Nothing done on this front

 5) Bug squashing of Debian Med team maintained packages
    Two bugs fixed by new upstream version of GinkgoCADx (#657827, #648167)

 6) If time permits work on some Beast related phylogeny packages
    Uploaded phy-spread package 

 7) Checking status of Debian Med tasks
    The attempt to check the tasks was completely spoiled when noticing that
    the tools are broken because of technical changes in Debian
    infrastructure[5].  Sorting this out and enabling regularly
    updated tasks pages is now on highest position in my priority list.

 8) Spontaneous mentoring of people
    I gave a spontaneous introductional talk about Debian and Blends structure
    Moreover I was mentoring Quyen, Laszlo and others about gpg keys

 9) Working on Blends sentinel bugs overview
    This was terribly blocked by non-functional fetching translations from
    ddtp.debian.net which is down. Caring for alternatives to at least get
    tasks pages updated again but no success so far. (see also item 7) above)

10) Helping others packaging and sponsoring
     * Sponsored chado (gmod suite) prepared by Olivier Sallou
     * Helped Charles getting snappy-java using Debian packaged library (see below external wishlist)
     * Worked with Ivo on copasi
     * Helped Martin with Python packaging
     * Dived a bit into a Ruby package together with Quyen with no
       certain outcome - needs further negotiation with Quyen and
       other upstream how to proceed
     * Checking the work of Piero on three Python packages
     * Had a look with Toni into OpenMicroscopy noticing that it is a beast
       containing > 800 binary JAR files inside the source and will take a
       talented and very patient Java expert to copy with all this stuff
       The good news is that upstream was quite supportive to provide a
       downloadable versioned archive which simplifies obtaining the source
       Needs (a lot) of further work which I'm unable to do myself

11) License checking
    I was suggesting an ePetition to free Phylip and wrote a first draft
    for it[6]

Thanks to al participants who joined the workshop and made it a
success (again).  Looking foreward to next Debian Med workshop.

Kind regards

        Andreas.


[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012#Andreas_Tille
[3] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/beast-mcmc/trunk/
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2012/01/msg00078.html
[6] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/Meeting/Southport2012/ePetition_Phylip

-- 
http://fam-tille.de