[Debian Science Workshop] Preliminary results of fdmnes packaging
Hello,
I would like to inform you about one result of the "Debian packaging
hands-on tutorial" which was integrated into the Debian Science
sprint[1] kindly hosted by ESFR[2] (thanks to the organisers). In the
tutorial session I was busy with Rainer Wilcke and a colleague of him.
As previosely written in private mail I uploaded preliminary packages to
my webspace at people.d.o[3] and I now also have injected the package
into Debian Science Git. You can build the package as follows:
1. gbp-clone git+ssh://<yourAliothId>@git.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/fdmnes.git
(if you do not have an Alioth ID yet, you could also clone via
gbp-clone git://git.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/fdmnes.git
2. cd fdmnes
3. git-buildpackage
The resulting package is usially created in the directory
../build-area
TODO for ESRF:
Easy: Those people who will do the actual packaging work on ESFR
should be added to the Uploaders field and copyright for
debian/* files
Harder:
Ask upstream author for a license of the code and the
documentation as well as the "source" of the documentation
(be it Word or LaTeX)
See below for an example mail to ask for this.
Possibly hardest:
It seems the data files spacegroup.txt and xsect.dat
are not created by the FDMNES author himself but rather
by Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve, Laboratory of Crystallography,
ETH Zurich, Switzerland (ralf@kristall.erdw.ethz.ch)
For uploading the package to official Debian also a
license for these files is needed.
In short: The technical work to create a Debian package could usually be
done when sitting behind your desk. The very boring legal part is
something which is no fun and depends from the good will of others.
Frédéric, it would be a very good idea to add a
Depends: fdmnes
Pkg-URL: http://people.debian.org/~tille/packages/fdmnes/
to the relevant tasks file - this should fetch all relevant information
and puts the data accordingly onto the web sentinel page. From my
perspective the work I planed to do on this package is done. I'll stay
idle until I hear more from you.
Kind regards and many thanks for the invitation to ESRF (specifically
also the interesting visit) - it was a big pleasure to me
Andreas.
[1] http://www.esrf.eu/events/conferences/debian-for-scientific-facilities-days-1/Provisional%20Programme
[2] http://www.esrf.eu/
[3] http://people.debian.org/~tille/packages/fdmnes/
[Example e-mail to contact the author]
Dear <authorname>,
I'm writing you on behalf of the Debian Science team which intends to
support scientific software directly inside Debian. We started a new
effort to package <Photon And Neuron software ... please find a better
description> to directly support Debian installations in <please name
your and other important institutes. In this effort we started
packaging FDMNES and when doing so that there is no license statement
given neither for the code nor the documentation and the data however, a
proper free license would be a precondition for the inclusion into
Debian. It would be great if you would for instance consider the GPL
license and if you would also include the source of the pdf
documentation (*.doc, *.tex*).
Moreover it seems that the data files spacegroup.txt and xsect.dat are
not created by yourself but rather by Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve,
Laboratory of Crystallography, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
(ralf@kristall.erdw.ethz.ch). Thus the copyright belongs most probably
to Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve and a license statement that clarifies the
distribution of these files would also be needed.
[ optional
BTW, when we did the packaging we added some enhancements to the build
process. Feel free to consider taking over <Makefile / patches
location> into your code.
]
Kind regards and thanks for considering releasing FDMNES as Free
Software
<who_finally_writes_this_mail>
--
http://fam-tille.de
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