[Debian-med-packaging] Plast packaged for Debian

[Andreas Tille]

Dear Patrick,

On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 02:18:35PM +0100, Patrick Durand wrote:
> Here are some answers to your remarks : 
> 
> 1. regarding CECILL license (plast.sh), it seems we forgot to update that file to switch to Affero-GPL ; we'll fix that 
> 
> 2. we'll fix also the elements pointed out in your comments 1, 2 and 3 

Fine.
 
> 3. regarding PCRE, this was a design choice made during early stage of PLAST development: we wanted users be capable of compiling the software directly, without the installation of any other third-party packages but c/c++ libs ; we'll see if we can replace the "hard" dependency by a link to a system installation ; 

If I would be a cmake expert I would have provided a patch.  Generally
it is not a big deal to verify the existence of a local installation
of some library.  In case of trouble at your side I could ask for some
help in the Debian community.
 
> 4. regarding "-msse3", we'll see if we can remove it ; indeed, we still compile Plast on "old" linux systems, so we have to check whether or not "old" compilers work without that directive. I'm not a deep expert of gcc... 

I'm no expert too but for the Debian packaging the general
recommendation of the experts is that there is no point in adding this
switch any more.

> 5. regarding the architecture, we indeed test Plast only on Intel and AMD 64bit systems ; I don't know whether or not the code compiles on other systems, such as arm or ppc ; so, I prefer you restrict Plast to Intel/Amd 64bit 

OK.
 
> 6. finally, we'll update the simple test we provide with Plast ; actually, it's there only to check that Plast binary runs on a host system ; but we can provide additional control as you mentioned. 

That would be really nice.
 
> I've seen that you have setup a git repository on your side to host Plast. Is there any way for us to access that git repository in write mode (git push) ? My idea: on our side, we could add a post-commit hook to mirror all updates made on Plast within our git repository hosted at Inria. That could be a more easy way to maintain Plast up to date in Debian Med ; I suppose that you downloaded the "tar.gz" of Plast from its web site, then un-archive, etc. So, please let me know whether we can make something simple our side to facilitate your work. 

There exist different workflows for Git packaging in Debian.  The Debian
Med team has settled for most packages by importing release tarballs
since in most cases the history of the code is not relevant for the
*packaging* work.  Sometimes we drain patches to fix certain bugs in
case some might be reportet.  If you really want to get commit
permissions that might be possible but I guess this will not be needed.
Just droping a mail about new versions to the mailing list
  Debian Med Packaging Team <debian-med-packaging at lists.alioth.debian.org>
should be sufficient - otherwise we have some sentinel running to check
for new release versions and will try to be quick with new releases.

> Finally, regarding Plast contact, please only keep Dominique Lavenier ; M. Nguyen no longer work at Inria. 

I updated the metadata inside debian/copyright accordingly.

Last question for my personal understanding.  As far as I understand
plast could serve as a drop in replacement for the non-free tool klast.
Is this correct or are there some changes I need to be prepared for
(regarding command line options or other things.

Kind regards and thanks for your response

      Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de