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

[Sébastien Villemot]

Le vendredi 23 octobre 2015 à 16:47 -0400, Peter Colberg a écrit :

> On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 02:45:21PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> > I would not bother packaging utf8proc. It is very small and already
> > embedded in a lot of packages (see http://codesearch.debian.net/res
> > ults
> > /utf8proc/).
> 
> The library is actually quite large with ~700K for the shared
> variant.
> Would the goal not be to replace all the embedded copies of utf8proc
> in other packages?
> 
> I think it would be good to package utf8proc not only for avoiding
> the many embedded copies, but also to test and potentially improve
> the upstream build files. 

Of course, from the point of view of Debian as a whole, it would be
better if utf8proc was packaged separately and all the embedded copies
avoided.

But achieving this goal can potentially be a lot of work, given the
many packages that are using embedded copies utf8proc. One possibility
(but I haven't verified) is that the copies are not exactly all the
same; so the first step would probably be to verify that the separate
package would indeed be a drop-in replacement for the embedded copies.
Then you would need to convince the maintainers to use your new
package. Of course this is work that improves Debian; but that may
delay your work on julia, so it is a matter of priorities.

> > dsfmt is also embedded in several packages (like xmds2, shogun,
> > openturns, as reported by http://codesearch.debian.net/results/dsfm
> > t/).
> > And my impression was that the patch for array-size arguments would
> > break compatibility with the implementation embedded in other
> > packages,
> > thus defeating the purpose of having a separate package. So I did
> > not
> > bother packaging it separately.
> 
> The patch breaks ABI compatibility, but it preserves the API and
> could
> be applied to a dsfmt package without affecting its usability by
> other
> packages. I wrote autoconf/automake rules to build and test
> libraries,
> which is straightforward with libtool.
> 
> Fedora has packaged dSFMT separately:
> 
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/dSFMT/
> 
> One question is whether to package only one library for the most
> frequently used exponent M=19937 as done in Fedora. I tend towards
> testing and shipping all of the exponents (in one package). There
> may be scientific use cases specifically for the larger exponents.
> 
> Another question is whether to enable SSE2 by default on i386. Given
> that the library explicitly targets SIMD-enabled hardware, this seems
> a sensible choice.

I guess you should implement an error message for non-SSE2 i386
machines (as I did for julia), in order to avoid generating a SIGILL.

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



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