[Debian-med-packaging] Seeking Advice on 2.7G Package Data

[Laszlo Kajan]

Dear Team, Andreas, Steffen!

Our lab has a new free sub-cellular localization prediction method [1].

We would like to package it, and it is almost done. The tool depends on an (arch indep) database that is 2.7GB (compressed, and it is used
compressed). The data is (or will soon be) available as a tar.gz via FTP. The question is:

* What to do with the data? - how to make sure it's available for the prediction method after it is installed?

  1: We tried to create a 2.7GB loctree2-data package out of the data, and make loctree2 depend on it. Creating the package went well, but apt
has problems with the size, it look like some bug in the stable version. This is not my preferred solution.

  2: Create a loctree2-data-installer package that downloads the large data upon installation, flashplugin-installer style. I am worried this
may be problematic for automatic testers (piuparts) at Debian, because of the large data it moves. Do I need to worry about this? Also I don't
know how this behaves with interrupted downloads (continuing the download should be supported).

  3: Have the executable download the data, or tell the user to download the data, when it is run and the data is not available, or outdated. My
worry here is that this makes system-wide installation more complicated. The installation would be done by an admin, but the large data would be
pulled in by an unprivileged user most likely, who can not install it into /usr/share/loctree2-data. The admin would have to be warned by the
user that installation of the package is not enough.

Please advise, and thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Laszlo

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=22962467