[Debichem-devel] ITP -Atomes, Bug 1019387

[Pierre Gruet]

Hi Sébastien,

[Cc-ing once the people the original email was sent to, for information]

Le 09/05/2023 à 14:55, Sébastien Le Roux a écrit :
> Dear DebianScience Chemistry community,
> Dear Mr. Paul Wise,
> Dear Mr. Bastian German,
> 
> Since my bug did not receive any reply for quite some time,
> I decided to try and contact you via email directly.
> Just trying to get in touch with someone, I kindly ask for your understanding,
> be sure that I am doing this for the very first and very last time.

Asking for help in the thread of the ITP bug is not the best way to get 
it, there exists the debian-mentors@ mailing list and also [0] which you 
could check out as it contains links to lots of great packaging 
information, tutorials... Also it is possible to ask on the mailing list 
of a relevant packaging team, as you are currently doing.

You gave a significant amount of information in the ITP bug [1], I think 
it might be worth also explaining how Atomes compares to other software 
currently in Debian, like Jmol [2] and maybe others that I am not yet 
aware of.

Concerning the packaging, I advise you browse the contents accessible 
from [0]. Your files allow one to build the package but I am making 
several points below, after a quick glance:
- it would be wise to separate Atomes from its debian/ directory. At 
least one should not have a "debian/" folder at the root of the orig 
tarball as it would be erased and replaced by the one coming from 
atomes_1.1.11-4.debian.tar.xz at build time;
- I see you wrote a manpage atomes.1, it could be moved at the root as I 
guess it may be helpful outside Debian;
- I think you are not shipping the html documentation that is described 
in debian/atomes.doc-base;
- d/atomes-docs.docs should be removed, README.source is not shipped and 
README.Debian is automatically installed by dh_installdocs (1);
- in d/changelog you should have only one entry with one line for the 
first upload, closing the ITP bug;
- in d/control, many dependencies from the binary packages could be 
omitted as they would be automatically inserted thanks to 
${shlibs:Depends}. Also the short description is too long and there is 
no long description;
- in d/copyright: you should use a versioned GPL license for debian/, 
also why choosing a license that is different from the one of the main 
software? Also these misses a License: stanza for GPL. And some 
copyright information is missing, see e.g. the files src/Makefile.in and 
configure.

There are only some remarks, I suggest you look for the rationale for 
them in the Policy, in the Developer's reference, ... and run helper tools:
- lintian spots many many mistakes, all of us should really run it;
- cme check dpkg-control, cme check dpkg-copyright (from the cme package);
- scan-copyrights (from the libconfig-model-dpkg-perl package);
- ...

> 
> In case this message would not get any reply I would, very sadly, consider
> that Debian is not interested in "atomes", and will stop bothering you.
> 

If you think Atomes is a software that should enter Debian, bringing 
something new, then go on raising the packaging quality, and you will 
achieve it :)

> 
> Best regards.
> 
> Sébastien Le Roux
> 

Best,

-- 
Pierre

[0] https://mentors.debian.net/
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1019387
[2] https://jmol.sourceforge.net/
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