Bug#1006621: ITP: boofcv -- Real-time computer vision library

[Andrius Merkys <merkys@debian.org>]

Hi Dima,

On 2022-02-28 22:04, Dima Kogan wrote:
> Andrius: you packaged some of the dependencies of BoofCV, and you
> mentioned that you were interested in getting BoofCV itself into Debian.
> Are you still interested in doing that? If you already looked into it,
> can you share any specific challenges that you hit when trying to
> package this library? I spoke to the upstream dev (Peter Abeles, Cc-ed),
> and he's potentially interested in helping with this effort. The 3 of us
> should be able to get this done.

Thanks for an ITP. I am also interested in getting BoofCV into Debian
due to one of my interests, Cephis, depending on BoofCV. I recall
running into obstacles beyond my capabilities, thus I dropped the ball.
Nevertheless I would be happy to revive the effort.

One of the obstacles I faced was the Gradle build system. Gradle in
Debian is several major releases old, and sources usually quite tightly
depend on it. Moreover, I do not have much experience with Gradle in
Debian, thus back then I used to spend much time patching the build.

Also I got quite many problems with dependencies. Some were difficult to
package for Debian, some were even non-free (if I recall right) and some
just caused FTBFS possibly due to API changes. Sorry for the vagueness,
this was in 2019 and I did not leave much self-notes on this. I ended up
patching many submodules due to the problems with dependencies.

I have my packaging at hand and I will push it once Salsa becomes online
again. I will use my personal namespace. I will let you know when this
is done.

It is great that you have contacted Peter Abeles about BoofCV. It would
surely be great to have Peter's help. However, I am afraid we may have
to start by looking into updating Gradle in Debian.

Best,
Andrius