[Debichem-devel] Bug#702573: libopenms1 - No stable ABI

[Filippo Rusconi]

Greetings, Fellow Debichemists,

> Package: libopenms1
> Version: 1.9.0-2
> Severity: serious

> OpenMS upstream does not provide a stable ABI of libOpenMS. So neither
> the patch to add one nor this package name are appropriate.

I am back to you about this bug. After a few mails exchanged with the
OpenMS crew (Oliver Kohlbacher, specifically), I ended coming out with
the following reasoning:

1 - OpenMS is a well-respected project that has an interesting user
    base;

2 - While the library is functionally stable (that is, it provides
    features that perform fine), it is not stable in the ABI stability
    sense;

3 - In the context of Debian, ABI stability is crucial for
    largely-used libraries because it avoids having to recompile all
    the packages that depend on the libraries each time 
    new ABI-breaking versions are released;

4 - Availability of mass spectrometry packages in Debian is almost
    NULL, since my project to bring to Debichem a complete set of such
    packages is still in its infancy. Therefore, at the moment, there
    is not a single source package that depends on libopenms;

5 - New versions of OpenMS are released at a pretty low rate, and I
    would think that this fact somehow limits the negative impact of
    having ABI breakage between versions. Thus, it might be perfectly
    possible to have a new soname version each time a new release is
    done;

6 - The authors of OpenMS state that ABI stability of libopenms is not
    their immediate priority and that they do not intend to change
    anything about it;

7 - I think that, because OpenMS is a powerful library aimed at
    allowing people to craft flexible mass data analysis workflows, we
    should accept the impact of ABI instability in favour of providing
    users with a properly-packaged library. For those present at my
    FOSDEM2013 talk [0], remember that the OpenMS software
    (2 libraries, 114 binaries) is huge and that the few mass
    spectrometrists I spoke with about packaging it told me that they
    could not even build it! I really think it is of primary
    importance to have that software packaged in Debian.

[0] https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/mass_spectrometry_debian/

After having said all this, I remain with a question : is this sound,
or is this totally unreasonable?

Thank you for your input on this subject.

Cheers,
Filippo

-- 
Filippo Rusconi, PhD - public crypto key C78F687C @ pgp.mit.edu
Researcher at CNRS and Debian Developer <lopippo at debian.org>
Author of ``massXpert''     at http://www.massxpert.org