On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Daniel Baumann wrote:
Carlo Segre wrote:
The biggest problem with non-free packages, which many science-related
pacakges would fall into, is that there is no automatic buildd system
for them.
hm?
I'm not sure if I did understand you right - are you saying that Debians
non-free suite has no autobuilders (which is not true), or that the
upstream packages have no build-systems attached to their sources? Or,
are they even all provided as binary-only?
The package I am in the process of working with is pgplot5. It is
non-free and source and build system is available. It builds fine under
pbuilder (on i386 as well as mips as far as I have been able to test).
It is not being considered for build, however. As far as I can tell it
has not been autobuilt since 2004 (a couple of packages ago). I have
contacted the buildd admins for all architectures and the only response I
got was one who told me that non-free is not autobuilt and to contact the
porters for uploads. I looked at http://buildd.net/ and it seems that
there _are_ non-free buildds but they seem to be different than the main
buildds in many cases. So now I sent an email to find out more about the
non-free buildd on alpha but I have not heard back yet.
All in all, I am very confused and I am thining of resorting to building
them on developer machines myself. if there is a policy that non-free
_does_ go into the autobuilders, then I need to know how to do it.
Perhaps I am just loking in the wrong places or asking the wrong people.
Sorry about the long core-dump. This has been vexing me for some time
now and I have a couple of packages which depend on pgplot5 and can't be
built on all architectures until this is take care of.
Unrelated to that - non-free is not a problem in Debian, but
undistributable it is. That means, even if a package qualifies for
non-free, it's better to keep it in the non-free suite on debian.org
than on any other unofficial/secondary repository.
agreed
Carlo
--
Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics
Associate Dean for Special Projects, Graduate College
Illinois Institute of Technology
Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.iit.edu/~segre
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
