[Debichem-devel] VOTCA available on my PPA

[Christoph Junghans]

2014/1/16 Michael Banck <mbanck at debian.org>:
> Hi,
>
> sorry it took so long, but I finally had another look at VOTCA.
>
> On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 03:12:44PM -0700, Christoph Junghans wrote:
>> 2013/12/23 Michael Banck <mbanck at debian.org>:
>> > On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 08:38:27AM -0700, Christoph Junghans wrote:
>> >> 2013/12/22 Michael Banck <mbanck at debian.org>:
>> >> > On Sun, Oct 27, 2013 at 02:55:04PM -0600, Christoph Junghans wrote:
>> >> >> I finalize found the time to make the first steps to package VOTCA for Debian.
>> >> >> The source/binary builds are available on
>> >> >> <https://launchpad.net/~ottxor/+archive/votca>.
>> >> >>
>> >> >> Please have a look and help me to improve it, so that I can hand it
>> >> >> over to debichem soon.
>> >> >
>> >> > I took a look at votca-tools now (as this is a Build-Depends for
>> >> > votca-csg and has to be uploaded first).  I see the following issues:
>> >> >
>> >> > 1. The -dev package is named libvotca-tools2-dev, i.e. includes the
>> >> > soversion.  This is discouraged (but unfortunately the library
>> >> > maintainer's guide advocated it at least last time I looked), unless a
>> >> > project is very widely used and switching all programs using it
>> >> > immediately is not feasable (like for GTK1->GTK2, oder Qt4->Qt5). I
>> >> > understand that Ubuntu ships it, but I would rather rename it to
>> >> > libvotca-tools-dev and either let Ubuntu deal with it, or add
>> >> > compatibility Replaces/Conflicts/Provides for it.
>> >>
>> >> Renaming is fine as it has only been released as PPA.
>> >> So should we just rename the dev package or both?
>> >
>> > Only the -dev package, the runtime library is required to carry the
>> > soversion in the package name.
>>
>> Done.
>
> You renamed it to votca-tools-dev and dropped the 'lib'.  This is not
> necessary, the development library should have the same name as the
> runtime library, just the soversion be replaced with -dev.  So it'd be
> libvotca-tools-dev.  The actual library is libvotca_tools.so, but I
> think replacing the underscore with a dash is correct (the underscore is
> an illegal package name character).
Michael, thanks for all your work! I think, I got a bit lost in the
naming conversions for libraries on debian.

>
> The other thing which I only stumbled upon now is the soversion itself.
> Apparently it is getting calculated at compile-time from the project
> version (currently 1.2.3) by taking the seconf number (2).  Is there
> some rationale for this?  Usually the best practise is to decouple
> library and package versioning, as the library versioning must increase
> when an incompatible API change occurs.  If the API is only added to,
> the second digit (which you are not using) should be incremented.
>
> Note that increasing the soversion implies changing the package name in
> Debian and thus rebuilding all reverse dependencies (well, in your case
> only votca-csg so far I guess).
>
> Maybe you are carefully changing your project_version according to this,
> but usually project rev their major version when they break backwards
> compatibility, so I am raising this here.  My apologies if you already
> knew all this.
I know, this isn't the nicest ways of handling the soversion, but so
far the API always changed in a non-compatible way between different
major releases, we might change to a different scheme after 1.3.
Beside the fact that a certain version of votca-csg is only tested to
work with exactly the same version of votca-tools.

Christoph

>
>
> Michael



-- 
Christoph Junghans
Web: http://www.compphys.de