[Please follow up ONLY to debian-science] [CC'ed to the Fedora CERNLIB maintainer and to Ubuntu MOTU-Science, for their information] I'm cross-posting this to debian-user on the off chance there may be some Debian-using physicists there who don't follow debian-science, which seems to have morphed into a developer list lately. I'm seeking one or more people to take over maintenance of the following FORTRAN- and physics-related source packages. cfortran cernlib paw geant321 mclibs (This message does not apply to my unofficial Geant4 .debs) Since my employment is no longer in the physics field, and family obligations continue to reduce my amount of free time for Debian, I no longer have time or interest to maintain these packages properly. The maintainer switch can be gradual (co-maintainership for "apprenticeship" for a while is OK by me, but can't be too much of a demand on my time) but needs to be complete well before the release of Squeeze (Lenny+1). Please follow up to debian-science@lists.debian.org if you want them. Nasty details below. For the reasons below, I think these packages are much too difficult to be maintained by QA or by a team (e.g. debian-science) that is not specifically targeting them. Therefore, if there are no offers, I will request their removal from Debian after the release of Squeeze (assuming they do not get RC bugs filed against them prior to that); until then I will maintain them on a best-effort basis, with a note in NEWS.Debian to the effect that they will go away after Squeeze release. Prospective maintainers should be aware that the packages are particularly challenging for the following reasons: * Most of the code is written in either K&R C or FORTRAN IV, with arch-specific #ifdef's around code for cutting-edge machines like PDP 11s. (That is not a joke.) * Bugs in new versions of gfortran often break various bits of code on obscure architectures and make the test suite fail. * The upstream build system is based on imake. * The Debian packaging is dpatch + tarball-in-tarball, with some hacks to make it possible to use Debian patches for building on non-Debian systems. * GUI code is based on Motif ... building the programs against Lesstif seems to mostly work (with some patches) but there may be as-yet undiscovered GUI bugs. * There was a lot of non-free stuff that had to be cut out of the source packages to get the existing tarballs suitable for main. However, this may not cause you much work, since... * Upstream has been dead since 2006, and moribund for several years prior to that. * There is no upstream support for shared libraries, nor for builds on Linux arches other than m68k or i386. Large patches have been hacked into the Debian source packages adding these. * Upstream source is not 64-bit clean. Properly fixing this would require man-years of work. In the meantime, a fellow named Harald Vogt has hacked together some patches that mostly make things work on 64-bit machines... but the patches are so fragile that they break unless programs are statically linked against the CERNLIB libraries on 64-bit. I will wait a week or two to hear from prospective maintainers. If there are any, I will email them with more info at that time. If not, I'll submit official RFAs to the BTS and send a note to debian-science that PAW and friends are slated for doom. In the meantime, prospective maintainers may want to take a look at my "CERNLIB on Debian" pages at http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/cernlib/ and also at the source packages (prepare to be horrified). best regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@gmail.com> WWW: http://www.starplot.org/ WWW: http://people.debian.org/~kmccarty/ GPG: public key ID 4F83C751
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