[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#780045: pylibtiff: New version available

[Andreas Tille]

Package: pylibtiff
Severity: minor

Hi Richard,

sorry for the late answer.  Our excuse for this is that Mathieu who
previously maintained this package left the team a bit after your mail.
I also must say that you are quite lucky that I stumbled upon this in
my mailbox.  The correct way to address issues like this is not a mail
to the maintainer but rather send a bug report using

    reportbug pylibtiff

    Severity: wishlist / minor
    Subject: New version available

This would ensure that there is a publicly visible record about this
issue and since I regard this important I hereby do so since I regard
this important for the needed discussion (see below).

On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 08:32:50PM +0100, nospace left wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> the package for pylibtiff (python-libtiff) provided in debian jessie and the corresponding ubuntu versions is based on the upstream SVN version 78.
> That version only supports libtiff4 but the debian and ubuntu releases in which this package is available do not provide libtiff4 any longer but only libtiff5.
> Therefore pylibtiff is not working there.
> See the following issues for ubuntu and the upstream project respectively:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pylibtiff/+bug/1401855
> https://code.google.com/p/pylibtiff/issues/detail?id=30
> 
> Would you therefore please consider updating the package contents to a more recent upstream version that supports libtiff5 ?
> I did test SVN version 107 and it seems to solve the mentioned issues.

I injected some packaging for SVN version 107 into packaging SVN.
However, when doing the packaging I realised that the setup.py
clean target does the following change which I injected as quilt
patch to do not disturb the packaging process:

  https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-med/trunk/packages/pylibtiff/trunk/debian/patches/cope_with_upstream_changes_after_clean_target.patch?view=markup

As you can see it says:

  short_version='0.4.1'
  version='0.4.1'
  release=False

This sounds a bit suspicious to be a target for a Debian release.  Since
you are interested in the package I wonder whether you would volunteer to
contact upstream what SVN revision they might consider appropriate to be
shipped as Debian package.  Moreover it would be way more comfortable if
upstream would consider releasing versioned tarballs as it is advised in
the Debian UpstreamGuide:

  https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide#Releases_and_Versions

This would easily enable us to detect new versions and we would not have
this bad situation to lag behind severely.

Thanks for your report

     Andreas.

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