[Pkg-electronics-devel] Starting to panic about (lack of) verilator, systemc, ghdl in Debian testing

[Carsten Schoenert]

Hello Larry,

Am 03.01.23 um 07:11 schrieb Larry Doolittle:
> Friends -
> 
> It would be an unfortunate regression if Debian Bookworm shipped
> without verilator, systemc, ghdl.
> 
> The meta-problem with verilator and systemc is that Ahmed El-Mahmoudy,
> listed as the current Maintainer, is no longer active in Debian.

so far I know Ahmed has given some information a while ago he is taking 
some free time from Debian, means not necessary he isn't doing any thing 
in or for Debian any more.
But yes, he is off for more than a year I think.

> I see Andreas Bombe, the ghdl maintainer, is hard at work making
> its build process compatible with testing's gnat.  Thanks, Andreas!
> 
> I'm most familiar with Verilator, and can confirm that modern
> versions of it, e.g. v4.228, build and run flawlessly in a Debian
> testing environment.
> 
> I'm happy to advise, discuss, and help test.  IANADD.  I read the general
> instructions for packaging using salsa git, but got very confused about
> how that git repo is intended to interact with upstream's git.

Best you mostly can do as a typical user of packages is to get in 
contact with the address you find in the field "maintainer". Like you 
did by your email.

It's also good to open wishlist bug report for version updates of 
packages so it's more visible for other that some update is probably 
required for the package in question.

Regarding systemc, by accident I've looked yesterday in the existing RC 
bug #1013046 [1], which mainly just requiring a usual symbols update 
within the existing packaging due a gcc update.
I've done this in the past for systemc several times, I'll try to do it 
again now.

verilator is build depending on libsystemc-dev and kicked out of testing 
due the RC bug in systemc. There should be no further work needed here 
once systemc has hit testing again.

But verilator has also some new versions [2].
Looking into the debian/ folder at the git tree [3] let me assume it's 
quite straight forward to import and prepare a new version.
I'm not using verilator so I can't do any QA after importing and 
packaging a new version, I also can't promise to have enough time to 
work on that.

What about you to step up and try to take over some maintenance? It's 
not that difficult once you have learned the basics.


[1] https://bugs.debian.org/1013046
[2] https://github.com/verilator/verilator/tags
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/verilator

-- 
Regards
Carsten