[Pkg-emboss-devel] Re: EMBOSS 4.1.0 released

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Charles Plessy wrote:

> There starts the problems: EMBOSS uses an obsolete version of libpcre
> and the current packages based on the work of Matt Hope ship by default
> files which conflict with debian packages.

What is the reason for the conflict?

> Also, we would need a file which is not shipped by Debian's pcre3, but
> the package maintainer was quite hostile to add it to his packages. He
> answered my wishilist bug on -devel, without putting the bug in CC,
> calling the developpers of EMBOSS "idiot", and avoiding direct
> communication.

Ahhh, here you are facing the real fun of Debian: Isn't it a challenge
to face social communication problems between technical persons and
try to mediate. ;-)))
To be honest.  The first technical job is to find out *who* in fact
here is wrong (either the libpcre3 maintainer or the EMBOSS authors
or both of them). I did not investigated in this issue but there must
be technical reasons why the Debian maintainer refuses to include
a certain file.  If this link is valid we should either try to teach
this reason to upstream or (if possible regarding the effort) to
patch upstream. Do you have any link about this issue?

In case the Debian maintainer is just stubborn for no technical reason
we could either ask the technical committee or just include the
needed file in our distribution.

> I did not insist: contacts with that kind of persons are
> highly demotivationnal ;

Nah, I believe there is always a solution - sometimes it is not
so straigthforeward as it could be.

> let us do what we can do by ourselves whitout
> disturbing Great Old Ones (it is 10 years he maintains this package).

Uhmm, I just learned that in some cultures this is highly offending
(if you don't show respect to elder people (regarding their real
live age)). ;-))

> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/09/msg00893.html
... which shows no answer in the thread index - so people do
not seem to care about this issue.

The assumption that the the name part "internal" is a hint to
keep something out of Debian is obviousely wrong:

   $ apt-file search internal | grep -v "usr/share/doc" | wc -l
   3793

so I would regard this argument as void.  But there might be
other reasons that speak against including the header file (even
if I do not see a reason in how far including a header file in
a package should do any harm).

> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/09/msg00973.html

Well, on one side you are right to defend EMBOSS developers
called idiots but sometimes people are a little bit to quick
in telling people names - so no big arguing is necessary.

What about building a local libpcre3 which includes the file
in question and look if this really solves your problem.  If
this is the case you might add this as a patch to your bug
report and explain the problem again and add the arguing that
other maintainers are brave enough to ship files with the
string internal in their packages?

> The other library may be easier to work with: it is libplplot.
>
> I did not think about uploading to experimental, this is a good idea.
> Let us see if we can get something uploadable.

Feel free to discuss this issue further here.

> PS: I used mc to explore the srcrpm, but did not find anything like a
> makefile. Does it mean that they do a ./configure && make && make
> install by default ?

Don't know.  DO you have a direct link.  I just see the tgz at

     ftp://emboss.open-bio.org/pub/EMBOSS/

> Have a nice day,

You too - and as I said, do not take personal insults to your
person or others to serious, just try to concentrate on technical facts

         Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de