[Debian-med-packaging] [debian] Updates to kissplice buildsystem and infrastructure

[Andreas Tille]

Dear Francois,

thanks a lot for contacting me in person.  Since the maintenance is done
in a team I and thus I keep the team mailing list in CC.  If you want to
maintain a packagage inside the team you should at least keep an eye on
the web archive of this list (which will receive a lot of automated
mails and might create too much noise for your personal taste if you
want to maintain just a single package).  However, it might make sense
to subscribe the more general list
    https://lists.debian.org/debian-med

Am Fri, Mar 11, 2022 at 06:50:21PM +0100 schrieb Francois Gindraud:
> I am a engineer that has been recently assigned long-term to the research team behind the kissplice tool. 
> I am taking over the maintenance of kissplice from David Parsons so it would be a good idea for me to become the point of contact in its place. 
> David is ok with it. 

Thanks for becoming the new contact for kissplice.  I took the freedom
to add you as Upstream-Contact as well as Uploader[1] (assuming that you
want to do changes to the packaging code in the future).
 
> We have made many changes with respect to infrastructure and buildsystem around kissplice, which will be available in the upcoming release (probably numbered 2.6). 
> I wanted to inform you of these as it will likely require changes on your part. 
> I could implement some of these in a PR like David did at [ https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/ | https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/ ] , but I am not familiar with debian packaging, and the gitlab move is outside what I can figure out quickly. 

I'd kindly invite you to simply push to the master branch.

> This mail is also to see if you have any suggestions of additional packaging-related improvements that I may have missed, before we do the release. 
> 
> Move to public Gitlab : 
> The reference kissplice versions will now be tagged commits on [ https://gitlab.inria.fr/erable/kissplice | https://gitlab.inria.fr/erable/kissplice ] which should be publicly accessible. 
> Starting from the upcoming release source tarballs will be the gitlab generated ones at [ https://gitlab.inria.fr/erable/kissplice/-/releases | https://gitlab.inria.fr/erable/kissplice/-/releases ] . 

I've pointed debian/copyright and debian/watch to the new source
location.

> We will let older releases on [ http://kissplice.prabi.fr/ | http://kissplice.prabi.fr/ ] but are not planning to add new ones. A link to the gitlab should be added there soon. 
> Sadly the source tarballs generated by gitlab for the 2.5.x releases are missing the bcalm submodule, so they are broken with no way to retroactively change them ; a warning has been added in their release messages. 

I admit that's perfectly welcome since we excluded bcalm from
the kissplice source anyway[3].  So we can probably drop the
Files-Excluded field in future.
 
> bcalm dependency : 
> bcalm submodule has been removed, and the default is to use an existing bcalm binary. 
> This fixes [ https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=%23962085 | https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=%23962085 ] upstream. 
> kissplice.py (/usr/bin/kissplice) expects bcalm in libexec/kissplice/ to support an optional bundled version (fallback for less technical users). 
> In the default case libexec/kissplice/bcalm is a redirect bash script with an absolute path (CMake cannot generate symlinks). 
> If you want to remove the redirect script, you can keep patching the bcalm path in kissplice.py ( [ https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/-/blob/master/debian/patches/fix-bcalm-install.patch | https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/-/blob/master/debian/patches/fix-bcalm-install.patch ] ) or replace the redirect script with a symlink (more resilient to future changes in the script). 

I'M not sure whether I understand this - probably I wait for
the release of the next version and run a test on it once
available.
 
> other buildsystem changes : 
> - the CMake has been upgraded to "modern" targets idioms, which should work nicer with respect to CFLAGS and others 
> - the user guide pdf is now built at compile time, so a latex distribution is now a build requirement 
> - the CMake build options include -fcommon for the binary which requires it, so [ https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/-/blob/master/debian/patches/gcc10.patch | https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/-/blob/master/debian/patches/gcc10.patch ] should not be needed anymore 
> - requirements with versions are provided in the top-level Readme.md, in particular for bcalm (validated with tests) 

All should be fine.  Please ping on debian-med at lists.debian.org
once the new version of kissplice is out.

Thanks a lot for the information ahead the final release

    Andreas.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/-/commit/0b764ef270418403940f0224d9c3127c6ca43b1e
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/-/commit/405bf5b321f454914542da9c124789cf6a2b4929
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/kissplice/-/blob/master/debian/copyright#L5

-- 
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