[Dune] Debian packages -- what is the status?

[Oliver Sander]

Hi Jö,

>
> There was one student (Stefan Breuning) who worked on packaging and an
> automated build system.  His work can be seen in
> <https://svn.dune-project.org/svn/dune-debian/branches/2.1/>.  This is working
> in principle, and anybody should be able to set up a virtual machine to build
> packages for Debian and Ubuntu.  What is missing is the setup on one of our
> servers to build packages for trunk on a regular basis.  I just didn't have
> time to do this.
>

That's good to know.  That means I can build packages at least locally
for the people here.

> Meanwhile, another student joined us who happens to be an official Debian
> developer (Ansgar Burchardt<ansgar.burchardt at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de>) .

Cool!  Welcome!

>  He's
> redone the packaging (mostly because he found it interesting I think).  I
> don't think his work is available publicly, if you are interested you'll have
> to ask him directly.  Since he's mostly aiming official Debian packages there
> are a number of licensing problems that crept up with SuperLU and (Par)Metis.
> In short, it may be impossible to distribute binary packages that have been
> compiled with these libraries (either directly or indirectly via ALUGrid).
>

Actually I think he is right in aiming for official Debian inclusion.
Legal issues aside I don't see any reason not to maintain official Debian
packages other than being scared of the responsibility (that's what's
been keeping me from doing it).

> ( In the long run, to keep the licensing problems as local as possible, I'd
>    like to see UG and ALUGrid split out of dune-grid into seperate grid
>    modules. )

Yes, I have also come to the conclusion that the best way of dealing with
the UG licensing problems is to split UGGrid into a separate module.

For a while I thought about the possibility of creating several different
binary Debian packages from a single source package.  That way you could
have dune-grid-without-uggrid.deb and dune-grid-with-uggrid.deb, both
built from the same sourcepackage.  However,
- I never found documentation on how to actually do that
- The number of different binary packages could grow rather quickly

Cheers,
Oliver

>
> Bye,
> Jö.
>