[Pkg-netsim-devel] Bug#875071: State of ns3 in the Debian distribution

[Martin Quinson]

Hello dear developers,

[I hope that this is the right channel for this. Please be patient if not]

I come to you to raise you awareness on the state of NS3 in Debian. It
suffers of two bugs concerning the graphical interface(s). One of them
is seen "important", meaning that ns3 will not be part of the next
Debian release (and it will also be dropped by derivative
distributions such as Ubuntu).

The problems are described here and here:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=785565
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=875071

In short, the first bug is about the dependency on pygoocanvas, that
will soon be removed from Debian. If ns3 keeps depending on it, ns3
will be completely removed also (it is already removed from the
"testing" rolling release, and will be completely wipped out if we
don't take any action).

The second bug is about the same kind of issue with Qt4. But I think
we have more time to react (as described in the bug report).

So, my question is to know whether you have any plan to replace these
dependencies with the modern versions of these functionnality (gir in
the case of pygoocanvas IIRC, and Qt5 in the other case). 

Also, if you have an easy way to drop these dependencies (by disabling
them at build time), that could solve the issue on our side.  I know I
should RTFM for that, but I fail to find the time, and I would
appreciate this help in the package maintainance, please. The current
build receipe is here (that's a makefile):
http://sources.debian.net/src/ns3/3.26%2Bdfsg-1/debian/rules/
If you're interested, the build logs are here:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=ns3&suite=sid

When answering this email, that'd be great if you could keep the bug
reports in CC so that we can keep track of it from the Debian
perspective.

-- 
You have a problem and decide to use git. 
Now you have a forest of subtly incompatible solutions.
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