Bug#787861: review: polyml

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

Hi James,



>Thank you for continuing to look at this. I have just uploaded the newest version (5.5.2-1~rc1) to https://mentors.debian.net/package/polyml.


thanks to you for caring!
>1) I have sent a request to join debian-science. Presumably I should wait until the package is ready to be uploaded before requesting an upload?


nope, I'm member of debian-science, I can sponsor it because I'm part of the team already.
(maybe we can cc debian-science too, I'm doing it right now)


and this is a package that has only *one* maintainer upload dated 2009 and an NMU dated 2012,
if somebody complains they should start maintain the package instead of making them outdated :)


>2) By this do you mean change it from an NMU to a team upload in the changelog? If so, I have done that.

correct, but you need to start with a "* Team Upload"
dch --team does this for you

>6) It had it before (https://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/polyml/filelist). It is in fact required by the new “polyc” compiler executable (a shell script; the output binary is linked against libpolymain) which is currently part of the “polyml” binary package.

well, and then you are forcing people to link against a static library? I would expect the package polyml to depend on the -dev package, and allowing people to choose their favourite library version
(or moving the polyc inside the -dev package, since it is useful for developing stuff)

7) I know it fails to build on hurd-i386 (due to a lack of PATH_MAX), which I plan to fix and submit upstream. However, I imagine it probably does build on a lot of the other architectures that aren’t listed.

yes, there is no need to restrict where not necessary.
specially for ppc64* and arm64 archs I guess it should build cleanly

9) The entirety of libffi/ is licensed under the MIT license, and is a copy of the source for https://sourceware.org/libffi/, apart from some unlicensed files in its test suite, and a few other files:

>> debian:polyml-5.5.2 james% licensecheck * -r | grep -v 'GENERATED FILE$' | grep -v 'LGPL (v2.1 or later)$' | grep -v '^libffi/.* MIT/X11 (BSD like)$' | grep -v '^libffi/testsuite/libffi\.call.*\*No copyright\* UNKNOWN$'
>
>I have added an entry to debian/copyright listing libffi as MIT; is this sufficient?


I guess you should add also them (at least)

 libffi/msvcc.sh: MPL (v1.1) GPL (unversioned/unknown version)
 libffi/texinfo.tex: GPL (v3)
 libffi/ltmain.sh: GPL (v2 or later)
 ltmain.sh: GPL (v2 or later)

11) Changed


nitpick: 

instead of "debian/tmp/usr/share/man/man1/poly.1"

it should work also a
"usr/share/man/man1/poly.1" version.


new points:
mentors shows something:

I unused-file-paragraph-in-dep5-copyright

paragraph at line 10
paragraph at line 5

I vcs-field-not-canonical

http://git.debian.org/?p=debian-science/packages/polyml.git https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-science/packages/polyml.git
git://git.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/polyml.git git://anonscm.debian.org/debian-science/packages/polyml.git


W shlib-with-executable-stack
usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpolyml.so.6.0.0


the last specially is something I never encountered, but seems bad


cheers,

Gianfranco