[Showme-devel] Jupyter/Beaker packaging

[Gordon Ball]

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On 22/10/15 15:37, Gordon Ball wrote:
> 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.

I will be offline for most of November so won't be able to do anything
with this in the short term, but I have uploaded a tarball containing
all the git-buildpackage repositories. [1]

If anyone wants to improve them in the meanwhile, feel free.
> 
> 
>>> [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
> 
> 

Gordon

[1]: http://chronitis.net/~gordon/jupyter-kernel-packaging.tar.gz
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