[Debian-astro-maintainers] Contributing LIGO software to Debian

[Leo P. Singer]

Hi,

I am part of an experiment called LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory [1], that uses laser light to detect and study gravitational-waves, ripples in space time produced by collisions of black holes. I want to offer to contribute our project's software stack to Debian-Astro. This would lower the barrier of entry for researchers and students to work with LIGO data.

Our software mainly consists of LALSuite [2], a collection of several C and Python packages that provide tools and libraries that are coarsely organized by scientific topic. Our collaboration already generates Debian packages (as well as RPMs) to deploy our code on our Debian (as well as Scientific Linux) computing clusters. I am not a maintainer of any of these packages myself, but I am a frequent contributor on both the codes themselves and the Debian packaging. I would probably be involved in some way in actually uploading the packages to Debian.

I have a few questions about how to get this process started. We keep our Debian package source in our own public source repositories. We prioritize developing for the current stable Debian release because that is what we run on our clusters, although I have made sure that at the moment everything builds Lintian-clean on testing and unstable as well. How would this work with Debian-Astro's model? Would we need to have a mirror of our source code on Alioth, for example?

On a more technical level, I wanted to ask about one particular package of ours, glue. It's a dependency of most of our Python software and provides I/O and workflow management ("glue" code). It conflicts with the existing python-glue package [3]. Would it be sufficient for us to rename our package python-logo-glue and declare the conflict in the control file?

Thanks,
Leo

----
Dr. Leo P. Singer
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Astroparticle Physics Laboratory
Code 661, 8800 Greenbelt Rd.
Greenbelt, MD 20771, U.S.A.


[1] http://www.ligo.org
[2] https://versions.ligo.org/cgit/lalsuite/tree/
[3] https://packages.debian.org/sid/python-glue

----
Dr. Leo P. Singer
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Astroparticle Physics Laboratory
Code 661, 8800 Greenbelt Rd.
Greenbelt, MD 20771, U.S.A.