[Pkg-julia-devel] Need help for packaging Julia 0.4

[Sébastien Villemot]

[Replying to the pkg-julia list]

Le jeudi 15 octobre 2015 à 14:20 -0400, Peter Colberg a écrit :
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:49:51AM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> > Is any of you interested? Note that it is not necessary to be a
> > Debian
> > Developper, I can sponsor the uploads. I would also be available
> > for
> > answering questions and giving advice.
> 
> I was about to file a wishlist bug for Julia 0.4.0.
> 
> Yes, I have been a long-time user of Debian and would love to help
> maintain a science-related package. I use Julia on my private Debian
> machines, and compile it from source for the CentOS machines at work.
> 
> I will fork pkg-julia/julia.git to update the package to version
> 0.4.0
> and let you know on the pkg-julia-devel list. So far I am not a
> Debian
> developer and would need upload sponsorship. Do you have any
> unwritten
> guidelines for the Julia packaging that would be good to know?
> 
> My Alioth username is pc-guest.

Thanks for volunteering!

I have added you to the pkg-julia project at alioth, so you should be
able to commit directly to pkg-julia/julia.git. Or you can work in a
public fork, as you prefer.

I have not written guidelines for packaging, so I'll try to guide you
by email.

First, I assume that you are somewhat familiar with Debian packaging in
general. If you're not, I can give you pointers.

Note that packaging julia for Debian is not straightforward. So if this
is your first Debian package, don't be surprised if that seems hard.
One of the difficulties is that we cannot use the upstream tarballs,
because they contain many embeddded dependencies (in the "deps/"
directory), which goes against the spirit of distributions.

The solution that I have adopted is to strip most of them for the
tarball (but a few embedded dependencies are still used by the Debian
package, because they are basically private forks of existing packages
for which we can't/don't use a separate package).

For the moment, creating the orig tarball is done by the get-orig-
source rule of debian/rules. The tarball is generated from git, after
checking out the release corresponding to the most recent entry in
debian/changelog.

I am not sure that basing our upstream tarball on a git checkout is
still the best strategy. Upstream now distributes two source tarballs:
one with all embedded dependencies, the other one with none. But we
can't use any of these, because we need some embedded dependencies. So
maybe the git solution is still the best one.

After generating the tarball, the next step would be to update the
debian/copyright file.

I am aware that the above explanations may not be clear, depending on
your level of experience. I guess you should first familiarize yourself
with the 0.3 package. In that case, don't hesitate to ask for more
details.

Cheers,


-- 
 .''`.    Sébastien Villemot
: :' :    Debian Developer
`. `'     http://sebastien.villemot.name
  `-      GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594



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