[Pkg-julia-devel] Julia 0.6

[Peter Colberg]

On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 03:51:55PM +0200, Graham Inggs wrote:
> On 2 July 2017 at 01:35, Peter Colberg <peter at colberg.org> wrote:
> > Julia 0.6 requires utf8proc2 2.1.0, which only supports Unicode 9,
> > while unicode-data was recently updated to Unicde 10.
> 
> I noticed unicode-data 10 was uploaded directly to unstable because
> wine-development started to FTBFS.  I am guessing our current utf8proc
> will too.  Is patching utf8proc to work with unicode-data an option
> for us, or is that better left to upstream?

Without having any specific knowledge of the internals, I would guess
that patching basically amounts to adding support for Unicode 10.

> > I plan to
> > suggest to the Debian maintainer to provide versioned packages
> > (similar to llvm) and re-upload unicode-data-9.
> 
> That, or in future unicode-data should first be uploaded to
> experimental and go through the normal process for a transition.

That is a good suggestion.

> > The documentation was converted to Markdown and requires a few Julia
> > packages to build (see doc/REQUIRE).
> 
> Are you intending for julia to become a build-dependency of itself?
> Or split the documentation off into a separate source package?

Julia module packages need not depend on julia if we use versioned
module paths as suggested by upstream (but currently reverted by
debian/patches/unversioned-system-load-path.patch). We could have a
dh_julia that installs modules to the versioned path (and symlinks
between multiple versioned paths to support multiple Julia versions).

That is the packaging model used for Lua modules, which I think would
be a good fit for Julia, too. Since Julia 0.5, libjulia is installed
as a system-wide library for the purpose of embedding, thus it should
be possible to install Julia modules without the julia executable.

> > The OpenSSL relicensing to Apache 2.0 [1] appears to be far away, so
> > libgit2 will lack HTTPS support for the foreseeable future. I suggest
> > uploading Julia 0.6 to experimental instead at some point, even if it
> > will not support external packages for a long time.
> 
> Does this mean Pkg.add will not work at all with 0.6.0?

Unfortunately yes. I wonder if it were feasible to forward-port pkg
from Julia 0.4, but it seems certain that upstream would not be happy
to receive bug reports as a consequence of such a transplant.

Peter