On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Daniel Baumann wrote:
Carlo Segre wrote:The biggest problem with non-free packages, which many science-related pacakges would fall into, is that there is no automatic buildd system for them.hm? I'm not sure if I did understand you right - are you saying that Debians non-free suite has no autobuilders (which is not true), or that the upstream packages have no build-systems attached to their sources? Or, are they even all provided as binary-only?
The package I am in the process of working with is pgplot5. It is non-free and source and build system is available. It builds fine under pbuilder (on i386 as well as mips as far as I have been able to test). It is not being considered for build, however. As far as I can tell it has not been autobuilt since 2004 (a couple of packages ago). I have contacted the buildd admins for all architectures and the only response I got was one who told me that non-free is not autobuilt and to contact the porters for uploads. I looked at http://buildd.net/ and it seems that there _are_ non-free buildds but they seem to be different than the main buildds in many cases. So now I sent an email to find out more about the non-free buildd on alpha but I have not heard back yet.
All in all, I am very confused and I am thining of resorting to building them on developer machines myself. if there is a policy that non-free _does_ go into the autobuilders, then I need to know how to do it. Perhaps I am just loking in the wrong places or asking the wrong people.
Sorry about the long core-dump. This has been vexing me for some time now and I have a couple of packages which depend on pgplot5 and can't be built on all architectures until this is take care of.
Unrelated to that - non-free is not a problem in Debian, but undistributable it is. That means, even if a package qualifies for non-free, it's better to keep it in the non-free suite on debian.org than on any other unofficial/secondary repository.
agreed Carlo -- Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College Illinois Institute of Technology Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494 Carlo.Segre@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre