Greetings, Fellow Debichemists, > Package: libopenms1 > Version: 1.9.0-2 > Severity: serious
> OpenMS upstream does not provide a stable ABI of libOpenMS. So neither > the patch to add one nor this package name are appropriate. I am back to you about this bug. After a few mails exchanged with the OpenMS crew (Oliver Kohlbacher, specifically), I ended coming out with the following reasoning: 1 - OpenMS is a well-respected project that has an interesting user base; 2 - While the library is functionally stable (that is, it provides features that perform fine), it is not stable in the ABI stability sense; 3 - In the context of Debian, ABI stability is crucial for largely-used libraries because it avoids having to recompile all the packages that depend on the libraries each time new ABI-breaking versions are released; 4 - Availability of mass spectrometry packages in Debian is almost NULL, since my project to bring to Debichem a complete set of such packages is still in its infancy. Therefore, at the moment, there is not a single source package that depends on libopenms; 5 - New versions of OpenMS are released at a pretty low rate, and I would think that this fact somehow limits the negative impact of having ABI breakage between versions. Thus, it might be perfectly possible to have a new soname version each time a new release is done; 6 - The authors of OpenMS state that ABI stability of libopenms is not their immediate priority and that they do not intend to change anything about it; 7 - I think that, because OpenMS is a powerful library aimed at allowing people to craft flexible mass data analysis workflows, we should accept the impact of ABI instability in favour of providing users with a properly-packaged library. For those present at my FOSDEM2013 talk [0], remember that the OpenMS software (2 libraries, 114 binaries) is huge and that the few mass spectrometrists I spoke with about packaging it told me that they could not even build it! I really think it is of primary importance to have that software packaged in Debian. [0] https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/mass_spectrometry_debian/ After having said all this, I remain with a question : is this sound, or is this totally unreasonable? Thank you for your input on this subject. Cheers, Filippo -- Filippo Rusconi, PhD - public crypto key C78F687C @ pgp.mit.edu Researcher at CNRS and Debian Developer <lopi...@debian.org> Author of ``massXpert'' at http://www.massxpert.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org