Hello, (I'm not subscribed to the list, please CC).
Following the announcement about the freeze, this e-mail is a request to either ship in Squeeze the newer versions of the Aqsis [1] (an off-line software renderer, unlike OpenGL or the like which do it in real time and on a window on the screen) and K3D [2] (a 3D modeller, akin to Blender) packages available in unstable, or drop them from the next stable release. I send copy of this mail to David MartÃnez Moreno (maintainer), although it was me who updated the packages in unstable, maybe he has another idea. In this case probably his decision should prevail. Aqsis ===== Aqsis's version in stable and testing is 1.2, and 1.6 in unstable that I created recently. 1.6 is almost 1 year old and 1.2 more than 3 years old (which will probably be 1+ years and 4- years respectively, by the time Squeeze is actually released) [3]. In between them there was 1.4, but this version was never uploaded to unstable. The reason why this package wasn't migrated to testing yet it's because it won't build on HPPA (it doesn't have any RC bugs or any other problem, AFAICT). I asked for an account in HPPA machines and verified that for HPPA, there's some kind of infinite loop when compiling some shaders provided by the package. The shaders are compiled by one of the binaries shipped with the package (aqsl), which uses flex heavily. I contacted upstream and they are not interested in it not building in HPPA architecture and suggest that it might be flex's fault. I don't have time to look deeper into the problem for a few weeks/months nor intimate knowledge of the code, so maybe I can't even provide a reasonable fix even if I try. Anyhow, the thing is that probably nobody ever ran Aqsis on HPPA, the more professional users of Aqsis would surely use top-notch hardware and they won't bother with versions 4 years old. More informal users would probably use more common desktop machines at home, not HPPA. So from my point of view, it doesn't make any sense to ship this software with a version about ~4 years old just because it doesn't build on HPPA machines. K3D === K3D's case is very similar, the main difference is that 0.6.7 version (the one in stable an testing) is even older than Aqsis', and the current 0.8.0.2 in unstable was released about 1 month ago. K3D is to be used in the desktop, and probably nobody in their sane minds are going to use a version almost 4 years old or in HPPA. Apart from a FTBFS with gcc-4.5 (#565008) and another known problem with missing Breaks (#588604) it also won't build on HPPA (#588923, this might be fixable adding another flag to the compiler), and it doesn't build on kfreebsd-* and hurd-* because of the missing package libinotify-dev. I tried to use the conditional dependency [linux-any] for this package (K3D *can* work without this library, only that it has the related features disabled); but pbuilder doesn't support it and I was told that the daemons on buildd farm don't support it either, although there were people trying to fix it. Maybe there's a way to get this working now. Conclusion ========== Aqsis is probably not going to be fixed to compile in HPPA (in time to Squeeze anyway), K3D might be if I have enough free time and you think that it's a good idea to give it a try. But if the packages are not going to be migrated for whatever reason and Squeeze is going to be released with the old versions, I think that it's better to remove them completely. What's your opinion about this, David and Release Managers? Cheers. [1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/a/aqsis.html [2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/k/k3d.html [3] http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqsis/files/ [4] http://sourceforge.net/projects/k3d/files/ -- Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <[email protected]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
