[Debian-med-packaging] Team maintaining python-igraph (Was: Status of igraph packaging for Debian)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Python Modules maintainers,

there is an offer of a member of the upstream team to team maintain
python-igraph.  I have no idea whether Tamás would mind beeing
subscribed to two different teams.  If it simplifies things we could
move python-igraph to Debian Med SVN (or Git - whatever would be
prefered is fine).

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 12:09:51PM +0200, Tamás Nepusz wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> 
> > OK, I have updated debian/watch file (please checkout svn[1]). I'd
> > suggest to always use this for packaging issues and keep us (= the
> > Debian Med team) informed about needed changes. The new version was
> > just uploaded to unstable.
> Thanks, looks great!
> 
> Also, I'm happy to maintain the offician debian/ dir of igraph at svn.debian.org in the future.

Fine.  As written above:  If you might prefer Git I'd volunteer to
migrate the package.

> I'll send a request to join the Debian-med team on Alioth soon.

OK.

> Also, I was wondering whether I should also maintain the debian/ dir of python-igraph, but it looks like that belongs to a different team so maybe it's better if I ask there.

Maintainers are in CC.  As far as I know there is no strong reason for
this split - just historical.  We should do whatever makes sense in your
opinion.
 
> > What I would be really wondering is the Role of R igraph. I realised
> > that it contains a code copy of (c-)igraph which is somehow against
> > Debian policy.
> I'm not that familiar with R packaging (on our side it is Gabor who is responsible for developing and maintaining the R interface of igraph) but I have a vague recollection that he once said that R packages that depend on an external C library usually also contain a copy of the source code of that library and compile the whole thing (i.e. the dependent library and the actual glue code between R and the library) in one batch when someone runs "install.packages(...)" from R. This is probably the reason why the R interface of igraph also contains a copy of the C library. But again, I never created R packages so I might be wrong here and the best is probably ask someone who is more familiar with R packages to see how it is done in practice (as I'm pretty sure that igraph is not the only R package that depends on an external C library).

In general creating R packages for Debian is one of the most simple
packaging job you can imagine since all R packages follow a very strict
structure and this is implemented in a nice helper module.  So creating
a new R package is basically taking an existing R package and exchange
some strings.

However, if it comes to code copies Debian is a bit picky and there are
definitely examples where linking against Debian libraries was done and
it should be technically feasible - but you are leaving the field of the
brain-dead easy R packaging.  I have no idea why Gabor just said it is
not possible.

Kind regards

         Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de