[Pkg-electronics-devel] bringing ngspice into main?

[Carsten Schoenert]

Dear Debian Electronics Enthusiasts,

a few weeks since my last email about moving ngspice into main have
passed by.
In the between time Gudjon has contacted me directly about this topic.
We came together that bringing a recent version of ngspice into main
would be the best and I could spent some more time on the packaging and
the also needed licensing part.

Am 24.09.2017 um 11:46 schrieb Carsten Schoenert:
...
> given that the KiCad team is wanting to release a version 5 of KiCad
> still this year [1] the topic about ngspice and the needed library
> libngspice for KiCad 5 becomes a new POV.

A small update on that, Wayne is planning to release KiCad5 around
Fosdem 2018 but I expect this is impossible. This brings some more time
for all preparations.

> As I've heart nothing from Gudjon in the between times that I shouldn't
> work on ngspice to bring this package into main I started and worked on
> the problems sometimes already.
> Some days ago a new version 27 of ngspice was released, so it's a good
> chance to not work on problems twice as we can do all the needed things
> on that new version.
> 
> But I'd glad to get some help here! The problem isn't the packaging, the
> main problem are the license issues on ngspice, or better on some parts
> of ngspice.

I started some weeks ago to contact upstream about some licensing
questions for ngspice 27. Especially Holger Vogt gave some answers that
are helpful. He gave also some advice how to build the sources to avoid
probably non DFSG issue that I followed mostly.

I tried to write down the circumstances about the source handling for
Debian into README.source, if someone has improvements or criticism on
that please say something.

> I started a wiki page for tracking the issues and a hopefully resolving
> of those.
> 
>   https://wiki.debian.org/KiCad/ngspice

Based on the answers from upstream I updated the wiki page a little bit.

> I also have prepared a local repository with a import of
> ngspice_26-1.1.dsc done with git-buildpackage and with some
> modifications I've done in the near past. The most of them are packaging
> things like moving the package to debhelper 10 and adding new packages
> for libngspice.
> 
> I've pushed this to my GitHub site [2]. Note there is no pristine-tar
> branch, if you want to rebuild please take the source of ngspice from
> the source package site [3]. I haven't imported the new version right now.

For further working I've imported now version 27 with dropping of the
non-free related source files. On top of that I added the packaging
stuff for version 27.
It's now all pushed to my GitHub site for ngspice, see [1].

I've created some additional binary packages against the old version 26
in non-free:

ngspice:
It's the same as the non-free version, except no ciderlib support is
build in.

ngspice-dev:
Includes the header files of ngspice and libspice0 symlink only.

libspice0:
Mainly the replacement for package tclspice which is being split of into
more packages. It holds the library libspice0 and a script tclspiceinit.
This package will also providing tclspice for transmigration.

libngspice0:
The shared library of ngspice.

libngspice0-dev:
The development files for using and linking against libngspice0.

...
> Before asking debian-legal I'd be happy to know the points that are
> clear DFSG or even not.
> 
> Any comments are welcome!
> [1] https://github.com/tijuca/ngspice-dfsg

As I haven't used ngspice before nor do I this now I can say much about
the usability of my current plans foe refactoring the packages. So I
like to here if someone can say it's ok or it needs more fine granulated
work.

lintian isn't complaining much (a bit surprisingly for me).

> root at x260:/build/ngspice-27# lintian -IE
> warning: the authors of lintian do not recommend running it with root privileges!
> I: ngspice source: testsuite-autopkgtest-missing
> I: ngspice: hardening-no-bindnow usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ngspice/analog.cm
> I: ngspice: hardening-no-bindnow usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ngspice/digital.cm
> I: ngspice: hardening-no-bindnow usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ngspice/spice2poly.cm
> I: ngspice: hardening-no-bindnow ... use --no-tag-display-limit to see all (or pipe to a file/program)

Will do further testing with the libngspice0-dev package which I haven't
done due some time contraints in the past. KiCad maybe needs some small
adjustments to find the header file now as ngspice isn't providing a
pkg-config file for this.

So long and happy X-Mas days to you! Thanks for reading.

-- 
Regards
Carsten Schoenert