Bug#869135: Please don't adopt giza for libpgplot-perl

[Ole Streicher]

Hi Karl,

On 01.08.21 10:14, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
> There does not seem to have been any further reply on this thread?

Yea, and the bug was then archived a while ago. For the discussion, I 
unarchived it and forwarded your last mail.

> Gregor says 'In Debian all tests [0] pass’
> 
> However, if you drill down in to the logs you can see they are not being 
> run correctly

The best would be to open a new Debian bug for libpgplot-perl with these 
findings. I would guess a bug there.

> The original Caltech pgplot is old software but works fine and is 
> required by a lot of astronomy software. Seems to me we can have a 
> debian package for it, and for giza-pgplot seperately? I note all the 
> advantages of giza, and it can be the default.
> 
> Would it make sense to create a debian package called 
> ‘libpgplot-classic’ or something for ‘contrib'?

I would guess that this is not that simple, as it would require a fork 
of the package. The problem is that pgplot is a static library (and the 
package itself is a one-in-all). Therefore, it would be needed as a buld 
time dependency, which would make the source package "contrib".

Another way would be to modernize the original pgplot package, with a 
shared lib and then let the user decide which one to link at run time. 
But this requires a significant effort, and the pgplot package itself 
seems quite unmaintained in Debian.

Cheers

Ole