Re: Sundials is way outdated
Hi,
On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 03:57:40PM +1100, James Tocknell wrote:
> Dunno if you saw it, but I had packaged 2.6 - 2.7 inclusive (plus the old
> versions) at https://github.com/aragilar/debian-packaging-sundials.
I'm sorry, but I do not see anything outside Debian Science git.
I'd be super happy if we would start to join forces on
https://anonscm.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/sundials.git
> Like Dima, I'm currently using the packaging, so it should work.
I thought it would be the sense of having a common packaging team
to not duplicate the work.
> The reasoning for waiting till after the freeze is there's a number of
> things we need to sort out with upstream, and given their responsiveness
> trying to do this before the freeze seemed impractical. The issues as I see
> it are:
> 1. The matlab/octave interface seems poorly supported (upstream may or may
> not drop it entirely), it uses a custom build script written in matlab
> (which requires modification to work with octave), which means we don't get
> multiarch easily. We could have dropped the interface, but it currently
> works (afaik), and the real solution (split it out and make it a proper
> octave package on octave-forge) would be time consuming and probably
> wouldn't happen before the freeze.
> 2. Upstream has broken the ABI in every release without bumping the so
> number (this is the most time consuming part of packaging sundials), and
> don't seem to think/be aware that this is a problem. My packaging went
> ahead and did its own thing (given upstream's response), but that's not
> really a viable strategy in the long term. I also raised the ABI breaks on
> Fedora's bugtracker, but nothing's come of that.
> 3. There are no real tests, there's some examples, we'd need to ask
> upstream for tests (if they have any).
> 4. Upstream does not communicate their plans, nor have a have an open
> bugtracker: for example, the first I knew of the 2.7 release (as opposed to
> them doing a bugfix release) was when they announced it on their mailing
> list.
> 5. Upstream switched from using autotools to cmake, which lead them to drop
> sundials-config (script which produces the correct link flags)
> . As part of my packaging, I've created pkg-config files, but it doesn't
> help if upstream doesn't adopt them (or chooses to name them differently
> given the different configurations possible).
>
> I did consider uploading something to experimental in the mean time, but
> given there's a very real chance that what we uploaded to experimental
> would not match what would result from discussions with upstream, the
> package wouldn't of use to anybody, and probably create more confusion.
>
> If you do want get sundials into experimental, I'm happy to help, but I
> think efforts spent on packaging sundials are best used to get upstream on
> board with being an easier project to package (and to coordinate with
> Fedora and other distros so that upstream sees this as a push from distros,
> not specifically from Debian).
Thanks for the clarification.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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