[Debichem-devel] [Debichem-commits] [debichem] r5051 - unstable/abinit/debian

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 08:24:44AM +0000, tille at alioth.debian.org wrote:
> separate packages for docs and examples
[...]
> +Package: abinit-examples

First of all, I built abinit now and noticed that it runs the testsuite
with 6 processes in parallel.  I think this is not very nice to the
buildds, we should limit ourselves to two processes max (or maybe 2 MPI
processes with two threads each, in order to get some better testing).

Further, I had a look at the contents of those packages, and I'd like to
object to the name -examples:

1. Those are not just example input files but also reference outputs.

2. Those are actually not examples how to properly run Abinit, but
testsuite inputs, i.e. they are not targetted at end users.  See the
tests/README:

|These tests are designed primarily to exercise parts of the code
|quickly, NOT necessarily to give physically sensible results.
|For greater speed, some tests are not run to full convergence.
|Also the quality parameters (especially ecut) are minimal, i.e.
|the calculations are underconverged.

3. They ship pseudo-potentials as well, not just input and output files.

4. A lot of them are not applicable right now, e.g. because we don't use
the bigDFT or libXC modules.

So far, my strategy with similar issues was as follows:

1. Ship the pseudo-potentials under /usr/share/<package>, at least as
long as it is not clear that those are underconverged or otherwise buggy
(and just for testing) as well. This also means to modify the package to
check for the pseudo-potentials in that directory (at least as a backup
solution).

2. Curate a small set of useful input files as examples for
/usr/share/doc/<package/examples.

3. Ship all those (and the documentation) in a package <package>-data,
which the main package depends or recommends upon.

Now, I see the benefit in sipping the testsuite so that
post-installation validation can happen, but this does not appear to be
the case right now and arguably, it should not be in an -examples
package and/or in an examples/ directory.

Finally, are you sure the whole (also the developer oriented)
documentation is useful?

At least the manpage abinit.1 should get moved to /usr/share/man/man1.

I hope you are not very angry at me if I ask to reject the current
NEW upload, so that we can find consesus on the package name and
content, before the name has been leaked into unstable.

Sorry it took me a while to answer, but I didn't manage to check out the
actual contents of the packages until I built them now.


Michael