[Debian-med-packaging] sra-sdk: should it be in Debian?

[Charles Plessy]

Le Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 04:47:04PM +0000, Steve McIntyre a écrit :
> 
> I'm working through the list of build failures for armhf while we
> bring up the new architecture, and I've just got to sra-sdk. I'm
> concerned about the status of this package:
> 
>  * the only maintainer upload into Debian was many months ago
>  * there is an RC bug open against it for months
>  * it fails to build on any of the architectures in Debian apart from
>    amd64 (as that's the uploaded architecture from the maintainer,
>    it's not even clear that it will build there on a buildd)
>  * a *very* low popcon score (vote ==0 !) suggests it has a very small
>    number of users
> 
> Please re-consider if this package should be in the archive or not.

Hi Steve,

sra-sdk is a bioinformatics tool to be used in the context of computationally
intensive tasks, which is why I have not pushed much its building on other
platforms than amd64.  The packaging bug that prevents building on i386 is
definitely to be fixed and I apologise for being slow on this.  But the rest, I
think, is best-effort as its absence on other platforms is not a regression.

In the chain of data analysis, this program is at early steps as it is mostly
used to unpack some biological sequence archives from the U. S. National Center
for Biotechnology Information.  It is not frequently used, but on the other
hand it is not a one-click install, and therefore the Debian package brings
some added value.  Also, I feel that its role of unpacking public archives
gives it another reason to stay in our free and universal system.

Build logs are here:

  http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-med/sra-sdk.git;a=blob;f=amd64.log;h=10a9060f1047416b022520077399c0554f99f45f;hb=546a25c253fbee56a7225c71e62d7f624dc63f28

I hope to work on the new upstream release soon, but for the moment by boss
lured into working on a funding application during my holidays…

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med team
Illkirch-Graffenstaden, France