[Showme-devel] Jupyter/Beaker packaging

[Gordon Ball]

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On 22/10/15 01:33, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Hi Gordon,
> 
> [Welcome to the list, Gordon - consequently dropping you as cc]
> 
> Quoting Gordon Ball (2015-10-21 17:10:15)
>> I have been making some packages of non-python language kernels
>> for the IPython/Jupyter notebook (#801366). It appears that there
>> is some overlap between the dependencies for these and for
>> Beaker.
> 
> Yes, it seems indeed there are some overlap there.  Great to learn
> about your work on that which also benefits Beaker!
> 
> 
>> I have packaged kernels for R, nodejs, haskell and julia. The
>> kernels and their dependencies can be found in a PPA[2]; the
>> targets are Ubuntu 1504/1510 but the R/julia packages currently
>> build without problems against unstable. Some problems have been
>> fixed but I don't guarantee that they're DFSG-clean, etc.
> 
> That is an amazing list of packages you've done.  Those Ubuntu
> packages is potentially helpful in packaging for Debian, and
> ideally the continued package maintenance will be done as a
> teamwork for Debian which then naturally trickles into Ubuntu and
> other derivatives as-is.
> 
Indeed. There should be nothing Ubuntu-specific in the packaging.
Everything except node-zmq (different nodejs versions in sid/wily)
built successfully on sid a short while ago. Maintaining them in
Debian would be ideal (but the PPA will probably live on for backports).

> 
>> The julia packaging in particular is basic (largely just copying
>>  files), and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of examples
>> of how to do it. They would probably benefit from a macro for
>> simple packages, and some decisions on how to properly handle
>> system library dependencies (which are bound at runtime, but a
>> file containing the library name needs to be generated at
>> buildtime).
>> 
>> My knowledge of julia, node, haskell is fairly basic - those
>> packages would benefit from the overview who knows what they are
>> doing. For that reason I'm also doubtful about committing to
>> personally maintain them all for the long run (but I'd be open to
>>  co-/team-maintainership).
> 
> Looking at a random package as example - r-cran-uuid - I notice
> that it uses both cdbs and short-form dh sequencer.  I am
> (positively!) surprised that even works.

Improvements welcome. CDBS appears to still be the norm for R and
haskell packaging (I tried to follow examples from the relevant
teams), but mixing it with DH might not have been entirely wise.
> 
> I can offer to join you in co-maintaining those packages for
> Debian, if you'd be ok to switch from short-form dh sequencer to
> (only) cdbs, and to track the packaging using git-buildpackage.  I
> am not particularly familiar with those lanugages either, but
> believe to be pretty well versed in Debian packaging in general.
> :-)
> 
> Or if that's not attractive to you, then either I can do it without
> you (cherry-picking whatever I find relevant in your current - and
> future - work in your PPA), or you can try find others to team up
> with in Debian whose practices are better aligned with yours.

I have no strong feelings about this in general, although it seems
sensible to try and be consistent with the practice of the relevant
language teams - which appears (I may be wrong) to be CDBS for R,
haskell, DH for node and nothing yet for Julia. In the julia case part
of the work should probably be developing some packaging macros.

My packaging repositories are already git-buildpackage (with
pristine-tar), but are only on my VPS. They can certainly be moved to
collab-maint or similar.
> 
> 
>> [1]: overlapping packages r-cran-jsonlite ijulia julia-bindeps 
>> julia-compat julia-json julia-nettle julia-sha julia-uriparser 
>> julia-zmq
> 
> More packages than above seems interesting for Beaker!
> 
> Also, Jupyter is likely a very attractive alternative to Beaker for
>  ShowMeBox uses, if not for our current project targeted Debconf16
> then for eventual future events (not yet planned at all, just
> dreams so far).

My motivation is that I use Jupyter (with python and R kernels) for
work, and having it easily installable "with batteries included" seems
a good goal. It probably fits the goals of ShowMeBox nicely - the
ipython notebook seems to be already fairly widely used in the data
science and friends community so there is plenty of example material
out there.
> 
> 
> - Jonas
> 

Gordon

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