[Debian-med-packaging] GAPS library

[Laszlo Kajan]

Dear Tom!

Thank you for getting back to me.

Hmm, the code is C/C++, Doxygen could be used to generated the docs. Guarantee of support - well in my experience this has never yet deterred a
Debian packager... :) The only thing that counts is the usefulness of a package. In case something gets broken for some reason, usually the
Debian maintainer (myself, or the Debian Med team altogether), fixes it with a patch, as long as they judge the package useful. When there are
bugs, we try to fix those too, and send the patch upstream (i.e. to you), or work on the patch closely with upstream. But it is your choice if
you disregard or use these patches.

The biggest 'problem' I see is the lack of version numbers in the name of the downloadable file. It is not really a problem, but if it were
versioned, and if there were a page (ftp or http) listing the available versions, that would allow the automatic scanner at Debian to notify us
when you release a new version (so we could package it quickly).

Upstream packages often look like this:

 <packagename>-<version>.<compression_extensions>

for example:

 librg-liu-bundle-perl-1.0.3.tar.gz

You say no documentation and no support. No problem, I say, but it seems to me that there /are/ new /versions/. Would it be possible to version
the downloadable, and include a ChangeLog file that would mention the latest version and the changes it introduced (briefly)?

Thank you very much Tom!

Best regards,

Laszlo

On 15/09/12 22:37, Thomas Funkhouser wrote:
> Lazlo -
> 
> There is a zip file with the source code for the most recent version of gaps at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~funk/gaps.zip
> It is not widely advertised, because it really has NO documentation or even description of the programs. It is distributed under the MIT
> license, and so you can use it for your own purposes, and I think it meets the "free software" requirements of Debian.   However, there is truly
> no documentation at all and NO guarantee of support , and so it may not be appropriate for Debian.with regard to the breadth of who can/will use
> it. I am happy to discuss .
> 
> Tom
> 
>