Hi Mattia, Mattia Rizzolo <mattia@debian.org> writes: > I noticed that root-system is keeping a lot of other packages out of > testing because it's currently broken. > > That's bad! :) I give you huge encouragements to tackle this! > I want to have a stab updating it, but before I'd like to know whether > somebody knows something I should know before proceeding, peculiarities > I should be aware of, etc. Here are a few things maybe worth considering: As you may know, ROOT has had a major version update from 5 to 6. Various versions in 5.xx are still used a lot in the community but upstream development of 5, other than bug fixes, has stopped. Version 6 is largely backwards compatible with 5 and brings many nice new features. Experiments/users that rely on having some specific version already build their own copy from source so I think the target audience for Debian packages would benefit from having ROOT6 packages more than ROOT5 ones. So, I guess the first big decision is to package just v5, just v6 or both. Maybe getting v5 "unstuck" would be a first step, but I suspect v5 will become less and less desired by users compared to v6. One new thing that may affect packaging v6 is the replacement of CINT with Cling for the ROOT C++ interpreter. This brings a new dependency on LLVM. Like many major dependencies of ROOT, ROOT provides a copy of the source for LLVM in case it is not provided by the system. I think Debian packages for ROOT6 should ignore this and build against Debian's LLVM packages. So far I have just stuck to plain CMake builds of ROOT6 but I see that the Debian (and rpm) package building scripts originally from Christian are still in place in the upstream source. > Then, it's kinda of big package, and if somebody want to join the effort > (by, e.g. reviewing/fixing what I did) I'd glad to have it :) My Debian packaging skills are rusty to the point of being nonexistent but I can test package builds, binaries or maybe in some other way help out with this effort. -Brett.
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