[Debian-med-packaging] Status of igraph packaging for Debian

[Tamás Nepusz]

Hello Andreas,

> When downloading the source tarball of version 0.7.1 I realised that it
> included some kind of competing Debian packaging done by Tamas Nepusz.
I wonder whether the tarball you downloaded was actually the released version; downloading it from the following URL right now gives me a tarball that does not contain a "debian/" subdirectory:

http://igraph.org/nightly/get/c/igraph-0.7.1.tar.gz
(MD5 sum: 4f6e7c16b45fce8ed423516a9786e4e8)

However, it's true that our source tree contains a "debian/" subdirectory. It's been like that for a long while now, but we only used it to build Debian packages from nightly snapshots "on demand", mostly for private use or as a favour to collaborators who wanted to use some features from the development version. That's why the changelog probably does not make much sense -- we simply did not bother to update it because these nightly snapshots were usually meant for private use or were distributed to our collaborators only. (Also, I think we also used it to build packages for Ubuntu Linux on Launchpad). Also, a while ago I made a failed attempt to reconcile our "debian/" subdirectory with the official Debian packaging but I had given it up due to lack of time.

So, the bottom line is that I'm pretty certain that the released tarball does not contain a "debian/" subdirectory, and I have no intention to maintain a "competing" packaging at all. I was wondering what the best course of action should be to avoid confusion in the future. Would it help if I simply remove the debian/ subdirectory from the repo and move it somewhere else (into another repository on Github) so I can still use it for private purposes if needed? Also, is there anything we could do to help with bringing igraph in Debian up-to-date with the latest version?

All the best and sorry about the confusion this may have caused,
Tamas