[Debichem-devel] Updating openbabel

[Alex Mestiashvili]

On 03/15/2018 08:42 AM, Andrius Merkys wrote:
> Dear Alex,
> 
> On 03/11/2018 08:23 PM, Alex Mestiashvili wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> The latest official release of openbabel is 2.4.1 which was released
>> more then a year ago ( on 2016-10-10). The versions in stable and
>> testing is 2.3.2 which is more then five years old.
> 
> according to https://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openbabel.html, the
> current release of OpenBabel (2.4.1) is already in testing.
> 
>> If for whatever reason upstream doesn't want to create releases, do you
>> think it is feasible to start uploading current snapshots? I can imagine
>> a version like 2.4.90~beta1~gitc4c05d7c for example.
> 
> I suggest asking the upstream about the release, possibly on their
> GitHub issue tracker. Maybe there is a major problem preventing the
> release. Packing possibly unstable (in development) snapshot of
> OpenBabel does not seem a good idea to me. I use OpenBabel a lot and
> even the transition from 2.3.2 to 2.4.1 has been quite difficult to
> adapt to (my colleagues and I are currently working on a manuscript
> describing the problems we ran into). In short, perception of some of
> the inorganic compounds has changed quite radically.

I have exactly opposite problem, the 2.4.1 has some bugs which are fixed
in the latest version from github. So my colleagues build the source
instead of using the packaged version.

We also need support for python3 which is missing in the current packaging.

> 
>> Alternatively will it make sense to create openbabel-beta or
>> openbabel-git packages with more frequent updates?
> 
> I have not seen such practice in Debian. However, I am relatively new here.

I guess there are few, for example wine-development.

Best regards,
Alex