[Neurodebian-devel] Debian packages for Stimfit

[Christoph Schmidt-Hieber]

Hi Yaroslav,

thanks for all your feedback.

On Sun, 23 Jan 2011, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> What about taking 1 step forward and making it ready for upload to
> Debian.
>
> * lintian would be your friend in such endeavor -- it detects
>  few issues on the current *changes
> * migrate away from a single .deb into
>  * libstimfit0 (or libstf0) + corresponding libstimfit-dev (now headers seems to be
>  absent from .deb altogether)
>  * python-stimfit
>  * stimfit
>  * you might also like having corresponding stimfit-dbg package
>    which would contain debug symbols...

Unfortunately, stimfit has a rather unusual structure that I'm not too happy with: "libstimfit" is not really a library in the sense that it could be used by anyone else. In fact, it's the full program that I had to split into a separate library so that it can be imported into the Python shell at runtime. If you wish, it's everything except of main().
Now the problem is that I haven't found an elegant way to make the autotools chain understand that. At the moment, I'm linking explicitly during install (L27 in src/stfswig/Makefile.am)

 	ln -f ${prefix}/lib/${STF_PYTHON_LIBNAME} ${PYTHON_SITE_PKG}/stimfit/_stf.so

This hard links libstf.so.0.0.0 to _stf.so so that the Python shell can communicate with the running program.

I would suppose that this is why dh_shlibdeps complains about all these missing symbols because it is not aware of _stf.so?

This being said, the deb seems to run and install fine on current Ubuntu and Debian installs.

One thing that I would like to add to the deb is the pure-python stfio module. How would I add this to the deb? Create a new control/rules/etc. directory? Or add a package to the existing files?

Thanks for your help,
Christoph