[Debian-med-packaging] Packaging GNU Health

[Emilien Klein]

Hi Andreas,

2012/11/24 Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu>:
> Hi Emilien,
>
> On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 09:24:29PM +0100, Emilien Klein wrote:
>>
>> Just to keep you updated, I've been able to properly install GNU
>> Health from source [0]. The issue I was facing were due to missing
>> dependencies for the Tryton modules, still need to file a bug about
>> that ;)
>
> Thanks for the update.  Could you please clarify where you consider
> filing a bug?

Against Tryton. FYI the issue looks like this:

module_c depends on module_b
module_b depends on module_a
module_c and module_b are installed, but not module_a

The error message displayed will be:
Exception: module_c unmet dependencies: ['module_b']

But it won't indicate that module_a is in fact the missing
dependency... Took me some time to figure this out ;)

>> GNU Health depends on Tryton 2.4. That version was present in
>> Experimental a month ago, but now it's been upgraded to 2.6, and I
>> don't think there is a way to get the 2.4 Debian packages back from
>> Experimental, is there?
>
> While you can find all past packages at snapshot.debian.org and you can
> even put this into your sources list but it is somehow hackish and I
> would not recommend asking users to put a snapshots entry of
> experimental packages in their sources.list.
>
> I do not think that reviving packages of outdated versions straight into
> Debian (which is in principle possible with versioned packages like you
> have several versions of Python) is promising considering the fact you
> describe below that GnuHealth is migrating to 2.6 as well.

GNU Health are basically modules for Tryton, but it seems to me that
their release cycle is not strictly in sync with the Tryton release
cycle. The latest version of Tryton is 2.6.1, but the latest version
of the GNU Health modules (1.6.4) still depend on 2.4.X...

>> The next version of GNU Health will depend on Tryton 2.6, but I don't
>> know for when that new release is planned...
>
> You might consider basing your packaging effort on a Snapshot from
> GnuHealth version control system.  This would enable you verifying
> whether the packaging might work as expected and once the new version
> is released you might be able to come up with a package quickly.

That might be a good idea, get the package ready, but only push it up
to Debian once the newer version is released.

As a general question:
If package A depends on a specific set of releases (like in this case
Tryton 2.4.X), how do we usually handle the case where the "libraries"
are updated before the package depending on the library?
Should I depend on Tryton >= 2.4 < 2.5? I assume that would generate
conflicts once 2.6 is made available, but GNU Health still depends on
an earlier version...

++
   +Emilien