Bug#886590: Please add python3-z3 package

[Fabian Wolff]

On 9/24/19 2:49 PM, Roman Lebedev wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 3:32 PM Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre at debian.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hello
>>
>>
>> Le 24/09/2019 à 12:51, Roman Lebedev a écrit :
>>> Bump. Any chance this could be prioritized?
>>> Lack of python3-z3 package prevents me from porting
>>> some other python2 software to python3.
>>
>> Thanks to the work of Fabian Wolff, we have a better version of z3.
> I'm a little bit out of context here, of *z3* or of z3 packaging?
> Also, link?

The z3 *package* was several years behind upstream z3, so I put in some work to package
a more recent version of z3 for Debian, which is what Sylvestre was referring to.

>> I don't know if he is planning to work on this soon but if you write a patch
>> i would be happy to sponsor it.

I can work on it; in fact, there has been a new upstream release of z3 (4.8.6, current
Debian is 4.8.4), which I'd also like to package.

*However*, there is one big problem: In order to build the libz3-cil package (.NET
bindings), z3 (starting from version 4.8.5) requires the 'dotnet' command:

  https://github.com/dotnet/cli/tree/master/src/dotnet

This command isn't currently available in Debian, and I have no plans of packaging it,
because I'm very inexperienced with Mono et al. (and packaging thereof).


Rather, I'd like to take this as an opportunity to drop the libz3-cil (and maybe also
libz3-ocaml-dev) package altogether. Those two packages cause _by far_ the highest
maintenance effort, and I dare presume that they were the main reason why nobody has
bothered to update the z3 package for so long.

The question is: Wouldn't it be better to have more regular updates and better
maintenance in general of the z3 package (I'd even consider co-maintaining it, given
that Michael Tautschnig hasn't made an upload for this package in almost four years),
at the cost of dropping those two little-used (according to Popcon) packages?

Because I suppose that I'm not the only one not very knowledgeable about Mono and OCaml
packaging, and this is a pretty large barrier to working on the z3 package (because
nobody wants to break these two packages, so they decide not to touch z3 at all).


But now, building the libz3-cil package is no longer possible unless somebody packages
the dotnet command (in which case we could always reintroduce it), and as to the OCaml
bindings, I have to admit that I'm not even sure whether they are currently functioning
at all (I had to do some patching in the build system even just to get them to build).


So, in conclusion: If I'm allowed to drop these two packages (but especially libz3-cil),
I will have a look at packaging the newer upstream release, and, while doing so, I can
also include a new python3-z3 package (and probably drop the Python 2 package, given
that it's reaching its end-of-life soon).

What are your thoughts on this?

Best regards,
Fabian