[Debian-med-packaging] status of meme Debian packaging

[Faheem Mitha]

Hi Andreas,

On Mon, 14 Jan 2013, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 04:42:26PM +0530, Faheem Mitha wrote:

>> BTW, does anyone know a good place to ask for help about MEME? This
>> page (http://meme.nbcr.net/meme/resources.html) has a user forum link,
>> but it is broken.

> Sorry, no.  If you find a reasonable way to contact meme authors - we
> need to ask them for a better download link.  The current ftp server
> layout is very bad for parsing using uscan.

The contact address mentioned on the web site is meme at nbcr.net. Have
you tried that?  I suppose another approach, if this got no response,
would be to email some of the people listed in
http://meme.nbcr.net/meme/doc/cite.html. Also
http://meme.nbcr.net/meme/doc/authors.html. They might not like it,
but they might reply.

>> Also, what do you do about this annoying habit of the MEME project
>> of having a separate directory with extra patches? I don't see them
>> in the debian directory.

> Good hint.  Well, the reason why we do not have these is that those who
> worked on the package (at least me) do not know about this.  This is
> *very* unfriendly for distributors.  It is hard enough to parse their
> version number at ftp mirror and impossble to detect new patch levels
> automatically.  :-(

You want a script to tell you when the patches are updated?  As I
expect you are aware, the current patches for 4.9.0 are at
ftp://ftp.ebi.edu.au/pub/software/MEME/r4.9.0/.

> Before we do upload the meme package we should install these patches as
> quilt patches (untested, but should work in principle).  I just added
> this to the TODO items in debian/changelog.

>> I was able to build 4.8.1 without problems. Maybe I'll give 4.9.0 a
>> try. Comparing the 4.8.1 build with 4.9 might be instructive.
>
> I think the differences are not that hard.  The quilt patches just
> needed some manual updates, an additional build-depends zlib-dev was
> needed and due to name changes of the resulting binaries I changed
> debian/meme.install to use wildcards instead of fixed names.

> Please test the packages and report issues here on the list (no need
> to CC me personally).

It seems you made changes to the Debian packaging, updating the
packaging for 4.9.0. I can confirm with this change, the package
builds and installs without problems, though I have not yet tried
doing anything with it.

However, adding the additional patches breaks the build, because there
are conflicts between the Debian packages, and those patches, at least
for src/init.c. I didn't understand what was going on well enough to
fix it myself, so I left out the upstream patches.

                                                         Regards, Faheem