[Pkg-phototools-devel] [RFC] Packaging notes for hugin

[Bruno Postle]

On Mon 28-Jan-2008 at 01:21 +0100, Cyril Brulebois wrote:

>> Otherwise it is a straightforward package, the only other odd thing
>> that is going on is that hugin makes use of autopano-sift which is US
>> patent encumbered - I can't add this to fedora and presumably the
>> debian situation is the same.
>
>Yep, no serious troubles with it until now. And indeed, the Debian
>situation is the very same. I guess you're keeping the libpano
>limitation as well for the same reason.

Yes though there has been some discussion of removing the limitation 
upstream.

[biased summary follows: basically a company called IPIX was 
patent-trolling around the panoramic imaging industry.  Although the 
consensus seemed to be that libpano didn't actually infringe their 
patents, the library was preemptively restricted to only allow input 
fisheye images with a field of view less than 160 degrees.]

IPIX went bust and their patents were bought by Sony, now this 
artificial limitation seems a bit of an anachronism.

>> This is ok as hugin is quite usable without, so there is a short
>> informational script that needs to be installed and configured
>> instead: utils/autopano-noop.sh

>I was thinking of adding info/pointers about that in the common doc
>location that is /usr/share/doc/$package/README.Debian.

Yes though the default hugin-0.7.0 behaviour (if no autopano tool is 
installed) will appear broken without this extra script.

>A last question, I'm wondering why .so's are shipped under /usr/lib. As
>far as I understand it, there are all private libraries, not supposed to
>be used by anyone else (no header is shipped), so they might better fit
>in /usr/lib/hugin, with an RPATH, don't you think?

Yes the libraries only exist because I nagged Pablo about the 
installed package size, there is no intention to provide a stable 
API.  A change in location ought to be implemented upstream though.

[I'm not sure if this will get through to pkg-phototools-devel as 
I'm not subscribed]

-- 
Bruno