Re: State of Salomé

[Denis Barbier]

On 2010/9/28 Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> Hello André,
>
> On Tue, 2010-09-28 at 11:04 +0200, Andre Espaze wrote:
>> Hello Adam,
>>
>> > The Debian Salomé package is good, and keeps improving.  But I don't
>> > want to upload -11 until there's a fix for at least the RC bug, if not
>> > two other runtime bugs, and I need some help.
>> >
>> > The RC bug 595281 is FTBFS with three different errors on Alpha, IA64
>> > and Sparc.  It looks like there may be a problem with IDL compiling of
>> > GEOM_Gen.idl as all of the errors are in its generated source files.
>> Whitout being developper, is it possible for me to access such platforms
>> with a normal user account? Or should I try to work with a Debian
>> developper? Or may you have another advice for trying the compilation
>> on Aplha, IA64 and Sparc?
>
> As far as I know, the Debian porting machines are restricted to
> developers.  I will see if I can get some time to log in to one of those
> machines and try a build.
>
>> > The runtime bugs are 596957/596959 (identical and merged) and 597885,
>> > one is a GEOM module segfault, the other looks like a CORBA problem
>> > during Salomé initialization by runSalome.  I don't see either of these
>> > problems, so I'm tempted to tag them "unreproducible".
>> >
>> > A third relatively minor bug is 597739: salomeloader doesn't work
>> > because of a simple-looking python issue of some kind, someone who knows
>> > a little python should be able to fix it in 5 minutes.
>> >
>> > I'm a bit over my head with all of these, and don't know where to start.
>> > Can someone help at least with 595281, so we can upload and have a shot
>> > at releasing with squeeze?
>> I will try to investigate the remaining bugs tomorrow.
>
> Thank you!  You may have seen someone else has found the same problem as
> 596957/596959 (the GEOM module segfault), so I can't tag it as
> unreproducible.
>
>> > In other news, André has ported nearly all of our patches to the latest
>> > upstream, and will send them in soon.  If all goes well, 5.1.5 (or
>> > whatever the next upstream release number is) will have many of our
>> > patches included, and packaging future releases will be *much* easier.
>> > Thanks André!
>> You are very welcome! I was pleased to bring a minor contribution to
>> the difficult task of Salome packaging. Thank you very much for leading
>> such project. By the way, do you think that I can send the report and
>> patches by the end of the week? Or would you prefer to have more time for
>> a deeper review? Then from this Thursday, I am going to be unavailable
>> until the 12th of October.
>
> I should have time to review these patches by the end of the week, maybe
> even today...

Hello all,

I have been inactive for months; there are many reasons, at least:
  - not enough free time
  - salomé is such a big beast that it is not possible to dedicate few
hours from time to time
  - builds take way too loooooooong
  - IMO the salomé Debian package still needs a lot of work before it
can be included in a stable release, I did not want to 'lose' my time
and chose to work on other projects

The current packaging makes sense, but I wonder whether splitting the
current monolithic source package into small components (one source
package per salomé component) could help us to improve momentum.  IMO
it will be much easier to deal with bugs/ports, and when the Debian
packages are of high quality, we could reconsider this decision and
come back to the current layout.
What do you think?

Denis