[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#855494: mgltools-pmv: runPmv does not start

[Ghislain Vaillant]

On Sun, 19 Feb 2017 09:00:07 +0100 Andreas Tille <tille at debian.org> wrote:
> Package: mgltools-pmv
> Version: 1.5.7-1
> Severity: grave
> Justification: renders package unusable
>
> Hi,
>
> I intended to reproduce #855485 but I was running into a different
> problem:
>
> $ runPmv
> Run PMV from  /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Pmv
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Pmv/__init__.py", line 378, in runPmv
>     from Pmv.moleculeViewer import MoleculeViewer
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Pmv/moleculeViewer.py", line 16, in <module>
>     from MolKit.molecule import Atom, AtomSet, BondSet, Molecule , MoleculeSet
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/MolKit/molecule.py", line 26, in <module>
>     from numpy.oldnumeric import sum, array, less_equal, take, nonzero, argsort
> ImportError: No module named oldnumeric

Not too surprising considering that the numpy.oldnumeric modules was 
removed since Numpy 1.9 [1], so it has been broken for a long time 
without people noticing.

We could port the code base to the current Numpy API, but I am not sure 
whether we will have enough of a user-base to validate it (see above) 
and how much effort it will take. Besides, the software did not receive 
updates for years so we would probably be maintaining this effort on our 
own.

Based on this 2 comments, one might ask whether it is worth maintaining 
a package for this piece of software.

[1] https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/routines.oldnumeric.html

Cheers,
Ghis