[Pkg-octave-devel] Sundials is way outdated

[Andreas Tille]

On Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 11:48:08PM +0000, Ghislain Vaillant wrote:
> > I admit I would have prefered if you would have left you as owner and
> > would take over the lead here.
> 
> I thought I was stepping on someone else's work (Dima or James) and

If this would have been the case Dima or James should have responded in
the last three days, right?

> that an official update to a more recent release was already underway.
> Hence myself leaving the RFA up for whoever was in charge.
> 
> I should state upfront that I am not comfortable with the way this
> packaging effort has been performed so far. Looking at the history,
> Dima started the work on 2.7 and imported the Debianization from svn,
> without any consideration for past work nor policy. The very minimum
> would have been to start with a `gbp import-dscs` if a proper import
> from svn was too hard to achieve, despite the process being documented
> in different places on the Debian wiki.

I agree here.  Before I was aware about the Git repository I imported
from SVN and when I tried to push I realised that the repository exists.
Stupidly I have removed my local repository that contained the history.
While I usually think that this is not really a big deal specifically in
the sundials case it might be relevant since as we discussed for the
octave interface we might need to rely on the older version.  However,
there is no response from the Octave team until now.  Is there any
interest from Octave folks (developers & users)?
 
> Finally, considering the complexity of this software, it would be nice
> to clarify upfront who is intending to maintain sundials long-term.

+1

> Again, looking at the history, Dima kickstarted the update effort for a
> week in October last year, and apparently gave up afterwards. That does
> not sound like a confident statement for long-term maintenance to me.
> 
> I hope you guys understand my concerns here.

I fully share your concerns.  Dima and James claimed that they are happy
with their work for local usage but this does not help from a Debian
point of view at all.  @Dima & @James: Could you please explicitly lay
out your plans here until weekend.  In case we do not hear from you I
think the best plan is to redo the SVN-Git conversion.  I can confirm
that the authors file from Debian Med[1] contains all contributors that
are needed to run the script:

git svn clone --no-metadata \
 	    ${SVN_URL}/${PKG} \
 	    -T /trunk/${PKG} \
 	    --tags  tags \
 	    --trunk trunk \
 	    --authors-file=debian-med-authors \
 	    --prefix=svn-import/ \
 	    --no-metadata \
 	    ${PKG} 2>&1 | tee >> svn2git_${PKG}.log


which I'm usually using for conversions (there are other scripts laying
around but the authors file is definitely helpful).  Once the history is
conserved the changes in the current Git repository could be applied and
hopefully brought up to a state that properly builds in a sid chroot.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-med/trunk/helper-scripts/debian-med-authors?view=markup

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