Re: Any interest in Debian packages of Geant 4?
Hi Kevin,
First off, great initiative. At some point I looked into packaging
GEANT 4 too, but ws quickly discouraged by the build process and so
forth - glad you took the time and effort to do so.
As for the size - yeah, it's huge, but so is CERNLIB, ROOT, and what
not. I think it's a minor issue. After all, what's a few hundred Megs
on a 100 Gig disk? :-)
To make things integrate even more, I'd do a package of the ROOT VMC
interface to GEANT 4, once that stabilises (i.e., works properly), and I
do more or less have an alternative GEANT 3 package with a VMC interface
too. Now, for FLUKA (the 3rd used transport backend code), the
situation is different, as it's closed source upstream, and the VMC is
licensed under a restrictive ALICE license.
On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 16:41 -0500, Kevin B. McCarty wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi Brett,
>
> (CC-ing to James Ferrando since I made a slight update of his clhep2
> package to the newest upstream version, and I don't know if he
> subscribes to debian-science)
>
> On 12/22/05, Brett Viren <bv@bnl.gov> wrote:
>
> > Have you contacted Geant4 folks to see if they would distribute your
> > debian/ source directory?
>
> Not yet -- I'd prefer not to submit it upstream until I've thoroughly
> polished and tested the .debs. (And if they do end up in Debian's
> archive, it makes life easier if upstream doesn't have their own debian
> directory.)
Fair enough.
> I also don't know whether upstream would approve of one of my
> improvements. I figured out how to make it unnecessary to set most of
> the Geant 4 environment variables by writing a couple of wrapper
> scripts: "g4make" to run make, and "g4run" to run a Geant 4 executable,
> in a subshell with the relevant env. variables set. (I also wrote a
> couple of scripts, env.sh and env.csh, that people can optionally source
> in their login files instead of using the wrapper scripts if they really
> want a polluted environment namespace.) See the README.Debian in the
> geant4 source package (see below) for more info.
In my humble opinion, wrapper scripts are ugly. That said, I could
imagine that it would be the best solution (for now) to package GEANT 4
- it's a mess when it comes to environment variables. However, in the
long run, it'd probably be better to lobby for cleaning the code of
environment variables - after all, GEANT 4 is really a library, not a
specific application.
> > Just distributing your debian/ source directory would make me happy!
>
> Well, OK. I've just made it accessible as a source package to APT. (By
> the way, I hereby license all of my Debian packaging for Geant 4 under
> the MIT/X license:
> <URL:http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php>) Add this:
>
> deb-src http://borex.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ unstable main
Got it already :-)
> to your sources.list. Run "apt-get update" then "apt-get source clhep2
> geant4". You need to build and install the clhep2 .deb first, then
> geant4.
Hmm. Will try when I have more time. Great effort!
> N.B. The clhep2 .deb comes directly from James Ferrando's unofficial
> package, just updated slightly to the latest upstream source tarball
> (2.0.2.2 instead of 2.0.1.1) - it isn't at all Policy-compliant yet. As
> I said, the Geant 4 .debs are also very rough still, so I'm not going to
> offer binaries yet and would appreciate it if you don't distribute any
> that you compile.
>
> Also, be sure to check out the hideous hack I wrote called
> debian/scripts/env.csh and be awed :-)
>
> All comments/criticisms about the Debian packaging so far are welcomed.
>
> > Also, if you need/want a distribution repository I can offer space on
> > the one that currently distributes the ROOT debs.
>
> That would be wonderful! I'll take you up on that offer once I feel
> the Geant 4 .debs are ready for public consumption.
Brett, you're becoming the HEP Debian software pusher :-) Cool. And
thanks.
Yours,
--
___ | Christian Holm Christensen
|_| | -------------------------------------------------------------
| | Address: Sankt Hansgade 23, 1. th. Phone: (+45) 35 35 96 91
_| DK-2200 Copenhagen N Cell: (+45) 24 61 85 91
_| Denmark Office: (+45) 353 25 404
____| Email: cholm@nbi.dk Web: www.nbi.dk/~cholm
| |
Reply to: