[Debian-med-packaging] Packaging Core Wrapper and CIFPARSE-OBJ for Debian

[Laszlo Kajan]

Dear RCSB software tools maintainers!

I am Laszlo Kajan, bioinformatician from Burkhard Rost's lab in Munich, Germany. I also contribute to Debian as a maintainer.

I needed a parser for mmCIF files, preferably from a scripting language. I found your Core Wrapper [1] for Python and CIFPARSE-OBJ [1] for C++.
I have compiled and tested Core Wrapper successfully on Debian stable (the current release) and unstable (a future release) - this is great.
Thank you for releasing Core Wrapper and CIFPARSE-OBJ under a free license.

I would like to package Core Wrapper for Debian, in order to make it easier to deploy on our cluster, and to make it more accessible to users of
Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian-based OSs (like Linux Mint).

? Do you endorse packaging of these tools?

? It would be great if I - and the Debian Med team [2] - could make contact with the upstream maintainer(s). Could you please help me with that?

? The Core Wrapper archive seems to contain CIFPARSE-OBJ in it. Am I correct? For packaging, I would have to package the two separately, and
make Core Wrapper depend on the (shared) library built from CIFPARSE-OBJ. Do you think this will work? (I have not yet tested CIFPARSE-OBJ: I
actually expected Core Wrapper not to compile without a compiled CIFPARSE-OBJ library - but it did.)

? When compiling Core Wrapper for Debian unstable, I had to patch some of the files. I would like to send my patches to the upstream maintainer.
Could you please give an address?

Thank you very much for answering my questions.

Best regards,

Laszlo Kajan
Rost Lab
Debian Maintainer

[1] http://sw-tools.rcsb.org/
[2] http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/