[Debian-med-packaging] ITP: scythe -- Bayesian adaptor trimmer

[Andreas Tille]

[Please note that this mail also goes on the list since it is not
 private and we are a team where several people could step in.]

Hi Kevin,

On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 12:25:58PM +1000, Kevin Murray wrote:
> > So I would like you to create an account on alioth.debian.org as advised
> > and become a member of the Debian Med team.  Once this is done you will
> > get commit permissions to the Debian Med Git.  Please note that it is
> > recommended to use pristine-tar for your Git repository (see the
> > relevant section).
> 
> I've created an account on Alioth and requested access. I'll push the repo to
> 
>     git.debian.org/git/debian-med/scythe.git
> 
> once I've got write access.
> 
> I'm not 100% sure about how I go about creating the "pristine_tar" branch, I've
> used Vince Buffalo's upstream git repo as the starting package. He has neither
> tagged the repo nor created a tarball, I'm simply going off the master branch
> commit at which he updates the version to 0.994. In this case, does the
> pristine tar branch simply alias the upstream branch?

No.  Pristine-tar and upstream are something else.  Pritine-tar has
information about the orig.tar.gz we will upload to the Debian mirror.
It ensures that anybody will be able to reconstruct a MD5sum identical
tarball right from the Git repository.  Without this metainformation
this is not possible.

I recommend you write a kind e-mail to upstream and ask him for tagging
his releases.  This is not only to get a proper tarball but also to
enable uscan watching this site for new releases.  We really want to
package what upstream considers as a release and not a random state
that is commited at the point of time when the packaging was done.

I'd suggest to use some kind of "standard intro" to such mails like I
recently suggested to Afif[2] (seek for "I'm writing you on behalf" -
may be other hints in this mail might interest you as well).  You might
also like to give a hint to the Debian Upstream Guide[3] where the role
of versioned release tarballs is explained in detail.

> > Otherwise it seems to be fine.
> 
> I've corrected the issues you've found.

Fine.  Feel free to inject everythink right into Debian Med Git even if
the tarball issue is not solved yet.  This helps presenting your work at
our tasks pages as "exists in VCS"[4].  If you might not get any timely
response we probably need to provide a get-orig-source to make sure any
developer will be able to get the same tarball when rebuilding the
package.  An alternative way to solve this would be to use tag based
packaging but I have no real experience with this and upstream seems
not even to provide any tags at all.  Considering the code commits are
not really new I have doubts that upstream will be very responsive but
than we should go with the get-orig-source solution.

Kind reagards and thanks for your work on this

        Andreas.
 
> > > [0]: https://github.com/vsbuffalo/scythe
> > [1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2015/05/msg00016.html 
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide
[4] http://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/bio#pkgvcs-debs

-- 
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