[Debichem-devel] Avogadro2 unofficial Debian / Ubuntu packages?

[Geoffrey Hutchison]

> As a first step, I've now overhauled the WIP molequeue packaging we had
> been lying around for years and uploaded it. It will take some time till
> it gets (manually) checked and processed, though.

Thanks. Molequeue needs some love, to be honest (e.g., lots of example scripts for submitting to queues, etc.) - I'm hoping to recruit some people there.

On our end, Marcus is reworking the Avogadro code so it doesn't require Molequeue for 1.94. (That should be done this weekend. Fingers crossed.)

I have a few minor things to nail down, but a 1.94 release should be ready at the end of May or the first week of June.

> I guess this just something that Debian/Ubuntu should activate, or are
> there license/copyright issues preventing this?

Hope not - pretty much everything is BSD 3-clause on our end.

>> Well, but uploading this to github releases doesn't provide any automatic
>> updates for users and their installation would also be overwritten by our
>> packages as soon as we update the official package (as long as you don't choose
>> a different package name).

I'd rather have the "upstream deb" get wiped out by the official packages. (To be honest, Debichem is great, and I'd rather just recommend the official packages.)

It took some time before people actually told me there were problems with the Debian / Ubuntu packages and was able to sort out the problem (e.g., not just some missing scripts).

I still don't know why people aren't willing to report bugs or pop into discussion forums. (shrug)

> avogadro2 might also want to supply their users with snapshot .deb packages that they can test and/or
> supply the latest stable release for an older Ubuntu LTS release.

We would definitely like to have snapshot .deb packages for testing. We build using github-actions on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 right now, and provide Mac and Windows packages for bug testing on pull requests. It would be great to have continual builds for .deb - even if they get overwritten by the official packages.

> Unfortunately, I don't know much about github actions, which would be the natural way to do this I guess.

We can execute any shell, python, etc. scripts on the Github VM. The "upload the artifacts" requires a particular action for the pipeline, but that's easy enough.

I'll see if I can draft an action for those steps this week.

Thanks,
-Geoff