[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#974016: mrs: FTBFS with libzeep-dev 5.0.0-1: "Checking for libzeep...libzeep is not installed"

[Sebastian Ramacher]

Hi Marten

On 2020-11-10 07:42:45 +0100, Maarten L. Hekkelman wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> 
> To avoid confusion, we're talking about three tools here: libzeep, mrc and
> mrs.
> 
> mrc is a simple resource compiler, is now compatible and bug free, builds on
> all architectures and should be kept. I believe it is very useful, using it
> I can create downloadable, portable applications that need additional static
> data without the need for installer scripts.
> 
> libzeep version 5 is the latest incarnation of a library I've been working
> on for 12 years now. It has evolved into a toolbox to build web applications
> in C++ inspired by the popular Java Spring framework and Thymeleaf template
> processor. It also contains a full XML and a JSON library. Using this
> library I could e.g. convert a pipeline to process genomics data into an
> interactive web application, the python scripts took up to 4 hours for each
> run, now you can do the same analysis in less than 5 seconds. I have a
> couple of applications based on libzeep that I would like to add to Debian,
> most of them tools used in crystallography and genomics research. But also a
> content management system.
> 
> And then we have MRS. This is a retrieval system, a web application capable
> of indexing and then searching terabytes of text based databanks on a single
> machine. Mostly used in the medical and biological world. It is used e.g. on
> mini computers that are sent into Africa where internet access is limited,
> that way large databanks like EMBL are still available. But I stopped
> development in 2012 when I switched jobs. I continued development of libzeep
> on which MRS is based but someone else took over development of MRS. A year
> ago I did a consultancy job fixing MRS which basically came down to
> reverting most of the attempted 'improvements' after I left.
> 
> Currently I'm working at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, here I write both
> software used in crystallography as well as a genomics analysis tool. Many
> of the crystallographic tools are moving into open source right now. We
> would have liked to include those in the CCP4 distribution, but
> unfortunately my code is way too new (C++17) to work in that environment.
> Next to that we would like to include our tools in Debian (DSSP already is,
> but that application needs an update), but if that won't work, I will set up
> a private repository to distribute our binaries.
> 
> I know libzeep is not very popular, that's because I never bothered much to
> find an audience. But I can't live without it myself, a lot of my tools are
> based on it one way or another. Libzeep is also quite mature and has been
> used in many tools in a production environment for many years now.
> 
> Sorry, long story. To make it short.
> - Keep mrc, no problem there
> - Upgrade libzeep to version 5
> - Kick out mrs until it is upgraded to use libzeep 5

Thanks for the detailed explanation. The first two steps are almost done
The current versions of mrc and libzeep should be able to migrate soon
as their RC bugs have been fixed.  I've now added a removal hint to
remove mrs from testing to complete the last step.

Cheers
-- 
Sebastian Ramacher
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