[Pkg-scicomp-devel] fenics_9.12.1_i386.changes REJECTED

[Steffen Möller]

Hi Johannes,

Johannes Ring wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Barry deFreese <ftpmaster at debian.org> wrote:
>> Hello maintainer,
>>
>> I am rejecting fenics.  The package is empty.  Should this be a native package?
> 
> Thanks for looking at the fenics package. Yes, it is a native
> package/meta-package that will install all the packages from the
> FEniCS project [1], that is, dolfin, ferari, ffc, fiat, instant, syfi,
> ufc, ufl, and viper. Will you please reconsider this meta-package? If
> not, can you please tell me what I need to do in order for it to be
> accepted?

If you want a package for the sole purpose of dragging other stuff in,
i.e. to form some unity for some regular use case, then you would pick a
dominant package of fenics and extend the control file in there for this
purpose. You would attempt to avoid the extra complexity of an empty
source package - so I think to understand Barry, and it makes some sense
to me.

The native packages are meant for Debian-specific bits, e.g. dpkg. There
is no upstream that is adopted by Debian, dpkg is some good part of
Debian, i.e. native. Everything else has the Debian version attached.
The policy document describes this nicely.

Your package was rejected since to obey to the policy you'd need to
prepare an empty tarball against which you have a diff.gz with the
debian folder -- this was considered too overheadish to be true, I
presume. Without having had a look at what you did, but having your
original email asking for sponsoring still in mind, I am confident that
you find another solution.

Best,

Steffen