Re: Torque in Debian?
Hello,
Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
>> I seem to recall that someone once mentioned packaging of Morten's Torque
>> packages from Ubuntu. I also seem to recall Steffen saying that he was in
>> contact with Morten. Based on quick search of my mail folder I can't
>> find
>> traces of either. Could someone kindly refresh my memory?
>
> We are now co-maintaining the package in Debian's pkg-escience team [0].
> The version that is currently in Ubuntu is in one of the branches.
> Steffen and I had independently packaged Torque, but our efforts are now
> essentially merged in trunk.
>
> It is my intention to upload the merged version to Ubuntu in the current
> development cycle (Lucid). There is a single bug in LP that can
> hopefully be closed along with that.
The new 2.4 version of Torque has seen its official praise now, indeed. You
may forgive my comment indicating that since gridengine is in Debian
already and accepted as Free, my interest in Torque has considerably been
reduced, though. We are just migrating to gridengine here.
>> [ Google sees traces of informal packaging of Torque on non-Debian
>> repos and
>> prior debian-legal discussion -- did that ever progress beyond the
>> earlier
>> "Nope" ? ]
>
> Oh, that. Yes it is a complicated situation, which doesn't get any
> better by the fact that the Torque maintainers don't give a d*mn about
> license issues. AFAIK several people have emailed them about it and they
> never answer.
They do answer, they just answer that they don't answer, suggesting not to
package it when we don't like it. I met upstream at their booth at the
supercomputing conference in Hamburg and had a few emails with them
afterwards. Without a clear go-ahead that the software shall be considered
as Free, it should go to the non-free section IMHO.
> The current Torque effort is the result of several forked
> projects the history of which are pretty much lost in the annals... in
> my memory at least :-)
>
> In Ubuntu, the torque package resides in "Multiverse" which corresponds
> to the "non-free" section of Debian. Torque has it's own peculiar
> license which tends to make the archive-admins nervous. It is my
> conviction however, that Torque in practice is FOSS perhaps even FLOSS.
I agree. This is why I still think that the package should appear after all.
Concerning the packaging, it is ready to be uploaded IMO. Actually, it was
only a comment on the free vs non-free issue in a favour of free that let
me retract a previous upload of 2.3 to Debian. I solidified my stance
towards non-free by now but was too busy since then to bother about
reuploading. The installation of the debconf-savvy gridengine-exec is
lovely in my mind. Morten views this all a bit differently and prefers a
non-communicating installation, which is also fine. He is the boss :)
Morten, whenever you want me to upload 2.4, tell me.
Many greetings
Steffen
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