[Debian-med-packaging] Distribution of MEME source code

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

thanks to Faheem Mitha who did some investigation whom to contact about
wishes of the Debian Med packaging team we've got this e-mail address.
We are not yet dived very deeply into MEME packaging but there was some
first effort done by Soon Gweon and we would like to continue from his
work to finally get MEME packaged for Debian on one hand for the users
but hopefully also for you as authors to make your life to distribute
MEME more easy.

We stumbled upon different things but lets split this over different
e-mails and concentrate on the first issue: obtaining the source.
Debian has an automatic way to detect and download new upstream versions
(via a script `uscan` that parses a `watch` file.)  In this `watch`
file you can basically specify a string with the download URL where
the version is represented as regular expression.

In the case of MEME this system is spoiled because you are using
versioned directories on your ftpserver and we can only specify the
version once for the download tarball.  (Well, we have some dirty
mangling tricks but to the best of my knowledge none of these will
really work here.)

We guess the motivation for your directory layout is the other issue
that is causing problems:  The way you are distributing incremental
changes to the source via patches.  This is totally out of reach for
uscan and we do not see any automatic way to handle this.  But finally
we are somehow bound to get automatic notification about new versions
(we can not handle 200+x packages by manually visiting all these
homepages.)

I somehow guess one reason for your versioned directories is the habit
of using those patches - so lets talk about these patches first and see
whether everything might come to an easy solution.  IMHO, there is no
real profit for any user - neither for those who directly build MEME
from source nor for any distribution be it Debian, other Linux distro or
BSD - to have this manual step to add a series of patches.  I admit it
might safe some disk space / band width at your side but these days it
should be no big deal.  May be dropping some really old versions from
your ftpsite should solve the disk space issue and we in turn try to
solve the band width issue by providing MEME from Debian (and thus also
Ubuntu + derivatives) mirrors.

In short: I would like to suggest to drop the patches approach and
rather provide fully patched source tarballs by making the patchlevel
an additional micro version.  For instance the latest MEME version
would be 4.9.0.2 (with patch_4.9.0_1 and patch_4.9.0_2 applied).

To come back to the directory layout the uniquely versioned source
tarballs would now enable a flat structure where all MEME source
tarballs could nicely fit into a single directory.  Uscan can easily
pick the latest version from such versioned tarball collections.

In case you have some other motivation for this kind of layout there is
another option with some minimum additional effort from your side: You
could maintain some HTML page (even automatically created by browsing
your ftp directory) or some Wiki page which lists either all available
version or just links to the latest version.  Uscan could be pointed
to this link collection as well and drain the needed information from
there (in case the latest version is somehow explicitly specified.

I hope this longish explanation was not to boring for you and that
you was able to make some sense out of it.  Please let us know what
you think about this.

Kind regards and thanks for providing MEME

     Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de