[Pkg-octave-devel] New potential packager

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 11:58 PM, Thomas Weber <tweber at debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 08:12:19PM +0100, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am learning how to do packages for Debian. My initial objective was
>> to help speeding up the packaging of octave versions but apparently
>> that is kind of "covered". So it seems I will help packaging Octave
>> forge packages that needs to be packaged.
>>
>> In this regards I have the following question. Is it needed that all
>> Octave Forge (OF) are packaged? I mean I see in the wiki lots of
>> complaints and warnings about packages that are only a bunch of
>> m-files and those could be managed within Octave easily without extra
>> burden to this group.
>
> It depends. The main issue of octave-forge is that people are very
> eager to create a new package. Several months later, that package is
> unmaintained.[1] There are some other issues (try to guess what's in
> "octcdf" compared to "statistics"), but in the end, it boils down to:
> "The group of contributors to octave-forge is very heterogenous in about
> every aspect of software development".
> The real question is whether that's a problem. If there is one large
> "unmaintained" directory, would that help or hurt? I don't know. What I
> do know is that it makes no sense at all to upload these packages in
> Debian - they are so special that no one is willing to care for them in
> the first place.
>
>> Is it sensible to categorize packages in relation to their dependency
>> on external libraries? Like stand-alone (which wouldn't require a
>> Debian package) and "dependent" (or something of that sort) for the
>> ones that depend on externals library and require a more exhaustive
>> dependency control?
>
> I would say "no", but I am not sure I understand what you mean. Can you
> elaborate and maybe give an example?
>
> [1] I have yet to see someone step up and take over one of the more
> exotic packages after it was essentially orphaned.
>
>        Thomas
>
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Hi,

Thanks for the answer.

I think OF philosophy is not clearly defined. As you said, and I think
that is the point of having it, OF has packages from pro-developers
and from amateurs as well. In particular OF gives the opportunity to
collect code generated by specialist of other fields outside Computer
Science and not all these people know how to do/maintain a package,
nor I think they will be interested in learning how to do it.
Nevertheless, they can code in Octave and they can contribute with
good algorithms. I think requiring for OF developers higher packaging
standards will eventually slow the project down.

In relation to what I said and was not easily understood, for example,
the package "miscellaneous"(http://octave.sourceforge.net/miscellaneous/overview.html)
is just a collection of m-files, no dependency with other Debian
packages or external libraries. Octave has a function to install
packages directly from OF servers (the function is not the best, but
it works and we must improve it!), and it can handle internal
dependencies (dependencies within Octave). This package is an example
of "stand-alone" package.
On the other hand, there is the package "symbolic"
(http://octave.sourceforge.net/symbolic/overview.html) which is based
on GiNaC and CLN. Clearly this package does depend on at least one
external library and that one is packaged for Debian. In this case it
is almost required that the symbolic package respects and complies
with a packaging standard. This is an example of a not stand-alone
package.
I believe, that big/complex packages like this have more chances of
being kept by a proper maintainer, and depending on their popularity,
taken over by another one, in case it is orphaned. Therefore I do feel
that only this kind of packages are good candidates to be Debian
packaged, and are worth the effort of this group.

Regarding the issue of orphaned packages. The packages miscellaneous,
audio and signal, are examples of projects that were abandoned by
their original maintainers and taken over by the OF community.
@Thomas: Are this the examples you were missing?
If you look at them you will see that those packages are
"stand-alone", and I can tell you that the people who took over their
maintenance are not "gurus" nor even experienced packagers. As I said
before, given the heterogeneity of OF, that Thomas cleverly noticed,
there should be room for these people and their contributions (IMHO).

So, my proposal is to start discussing with the current OF admins
about a consistent labeling of the packages, so that this group can
take care only of the ones that really need to be packaged. I think
this could considerably reduce the list of lintian warnings and
increase the speed of package release. What do you say?

Sorry for the lengthy e-mail.

-- 
M. Sc. Juan Pablo Carbajal
-----
PhD Student
University of Zürich
http://ailab.ifi.uzh.ch/carbajal/