[Pkg-julia-devel] Fwd: Pre- and post- Buster plans for Julia language related packaging

[Mo Zhou]

Forwarding to pkg-julia-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org since I didn't
include the list in the original CC list.

----- Forwarded message from Mo Zhou <lumin at debian.org> -----

Hello folks,

I think I should talk about the pre- and post- Buster plan for Debian's
Julia related packages publically rather than inside the three-person Julia
team, because neither me nor Graham is heavy Julia user. Peter is too busy.
Any suggestion and feedback will help us make Julia related packages better
for our users.

Pre-Buster
----------

[Confirmed] Testing Migration and Build Failures

  The most important work for Julia team before the Buster release is to
  fix build failures and bugs of julia itself. I don't expect Julia team
  to finish any more work before the Buster release.

  Dependencies and the vim plugin are in good shape[1].

[Not Sure] Really Supported Architectures

  Julia's supported architectures are less and less since 0.3.2 to 1.0.0 ....
   - The mips64el package has been waiting for removal.
   - Upstream lacks aarch64 (aka arm64) maintainer[2]
  Currently we only enabled upstream tests for amd64 and i386.

  I suggest we keep amd64, i386, arm64, armhf, ppc64el for Buster.
  But should we still keep an architecture if Julia compiles but fails
  too many tests on it? IMHO such buggy resulting binary package is not
  different from junk.

  @ginggs @peter Thoughts?
  
  For reference, upstream[3] only provides prebuilt binary tarball for
  three architectures: amd64, i686, armhf.

Post-Buster
-----------

[Not Sure] extra packages such as PackageCompiler.jl and Plots.jl

  Julia has a built-in package manager that pulls extra packages from
  github, conveniently. And I haven't found any extra package that should
  really enter Debian archive. Please tell us if you have found one.

  That means I shall not work on extra julia packages in foreseeable future.
  @ginggs @peter How do you think?


[1] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-julia-devel%40lists.alioth.debian.org
[2] https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/28783
[3] https://julialang.org/downloads/
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/julia-team/dh-julia


----- End forwarded message -----