Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[Salvo Tomaselli]

Yes of course for the users of Debian it's best to have it rather than
not have it.

Best of luck!

Il giorno mer 25 mag 2022 alle ore 03:49 Philippe Cerfon
 ha scritto:
>
> On Sun, May 22, 2022 at 10:45 PM Salvo Tomaselli  wrote:
> > My advice is to forget this. Upstream is really uncooperative and
> > Torvalds went to conferences to talk about this (conveniently
> > forgetting to mention he was depending an unstable library whose
> > author said "Don't use this yet")
>
> Well also had some interactions with upstream in the past and it felt
> indeed a bit "difficult". So I can kinda understand your frustration.
>
> Nevertheless, that upstream may be a bit distribution-unfriendly
> doesn't make subsurface itself less usable. I'd say it's still among
> the "best" software for diving in the FLOSS world - and that "market"
> isn't so big, so people cannot just easily choose any other random
> software (none if which would be packaged for Debian either).
>
> In the end, divers will just resort to some unofficial packages
> (security issues) or IMO questionable systems like snap. So I think
> there would be some value to get that officially packaged.
>
> Thanks,
> Philippe



-- 
Salvo Tomaselli

"Io non mi sento obbligato a credere che lo stesso Dio che ci ha dotato di
senso, ragione ed intelletto intendesse che noi ne facessimo a meno."
-- Galileo Galilei

http://ltworf.github.io/ltworf/

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[David Bremner]

Philippe Cerfon  writes:

> On Sun, May 22, 2022 at 2:09 PM David Bremner  wrote:
>> To be honest, I doubt that helps, since the hard part is not just making
>> packages (my repo on salsa already does that), but making them in a way
>> acceptable to debian policy, which is unlikely to be a priority for a
>> PPA.
>
> Were there any specific concerns in terms of policies left? subsurface
> seems rather simple to me, the only bigger point perhaps being the
> issue with libdivecomputer. But not since the "official" one is even
> gone from Debian, it shouldn't be to hard to make a point for a
> libdivecomputer-subsurface or so, when one could argue that this is
> really a fork and thus acceptable for Debian.

I have not looked very closely. Some issues I am aware of

1) As discussed, libdivecomputer. From subsurface INSTALL

Subsurface requires its own flavor of libdivecomputer which is inclduded
above as git submodule

The branches won't have a pretty history and will include ugly merges,
but they should always allow a fast forward pull that tracks what we
believe developers should build against. All our patches are contained
in the "Subsurface-DS9" branch.

This should allow distros to see which patches we have applied on top of
upstream. They will receive force pushes as we rebase to newer versions 
of
upstream so they are not ideal for ongoing development (but they are of
course easy to use for distributions as they always build "from 
scratch",
anyway).

The rationale for this is that we have no intention of forking the
project. We simply are adding a few patches on top of their latest
version and want to do so in a manner that is both easy for our
developers who try to keep them updated frequently, and anyone packaging
Subsurface or trying to understand what we have done relative to their
respective upstreams.

1.5) Submodules are a pain for most Debian workflows (except those that
 ignore the git repo).

2) There is minified js in themes/

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[Philippe Cerfon]

On Sun, May 22, 2022 at 10:45 PM Salvo Tomaselli  wrote:
> My advice is to forget this. Upstream is really uncooperative and
> Torvalds went to conferences to talk about this (conveniently
> forgetting to mention he was depending an unstable library whose
> author said "Don't use this yet")

Well also had some interactions with upstream in the past and it felt
indeed a bit "difficult". So I can kinda understand your frustration.

Nevertheless, that upstream may be a bit distribution-unfriendly
doesn't make subsurface itself less usable. I'd say it's still among
the "best" software for diving in the FLOSS world - and that "market"
isn't so big, so people cannot just easily choose any other random
software (none if which would be packaged for Debian either).

In the end, divers will just resort to some unofficial packages
(security issues) or IMO questionable systems like snap. So I think
there would be some value to get that officially packaged.

Thanks,
Philippe

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[Philippe Cerfon]

On Sun, May 22, 2022 at 2:09 PM David Bremner  wrote:
> To be honest, I doubt that helps, since the hard part is not just making
> packages (my repo on salsa already does that), but making them in a way
> acceptable to debian policy, which is unlikely to be a priority for a
> PPA.

Were there any specific concerns in terms of policies left? subsurface
seems rather simple to me, the only bigger point perhaps being the
issue with libdivecomputer. But not since the "official" one is even
gone from Debian, it shouldn't be to hard to make a point for a
libdivecomputer-subsurface or so, when one could argue that this is
really a fork and thus acceptable for Debian.

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[Salvo Tomaselli]

My advice is to forget this. Upstream is really uncooperative and
Torvalds went to conferences to talk about this (conveniently
forgetting to mention he was depending an unstable library whose
author said "Don't use this yet")

The video of that conference that happened ages ago is still shared
today to "prove" how the distribution model is bad, distro maintainers
are mean, and so on.

Just my advice.


Il giorno dom 22 mag 2022 alle ore 13:58 David Bremner
 ha scritto:
>
> Philippe Cerfon  writes:
>
> > btw... I've just seen there's:
> > http://ppa.launchpad.net/subsurface/subsurface/ubuntu
> > (including packaging for all the deps)
> >
> > So maybe, it could be much simpler to get this back into Debian, by
> > simply basing the Debian packaging on Ubuntu's.
>
> To be honest, I doubt that helps, since the hard part is not just making
> packages (my repo on salsa already does that), but making them in a way
> acceptable to debian policy, which is unlikely to be a priority for a
> PPA.
>
> d



-- 
Salvo Tomaselli

"Io non mi sento obbligato a credere che lo stesso Dio che ci ha dotato di
senso, ragione ed intelletto intendesse che noi ne facessimo a meno."
-- Galileo Galilei

http://ltworf.github.io/ltworf/

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[David Bremner]

Philippe Cerfon  writes:

> btw... I've just seen there's:
> http://ppa.launchpad.net/subsurface/subsurface/ubuntu
> (including packaging for all the deps)
>
> So maybe, it could be much simpler to get this back into Debian, by
> simply basing the Debian packaging on Ubuntu's.

To be honest, I doubt that helps, since the hard part is not just making
packages (my repo on salsa already does that), but making them in a way
acceptable to debian policy, which is unlikely to be a priority for a
PPA.

d

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[David Bremner]

David Bremner  writes:

> Philippe Cerfon  writes:
>
>> btw... I've just seen there's:
>> http://ppa.launchpad.net/subsurface/subsurface/ubuntu
>> (including packaging for all the deps)
>>
>> So maybe, it could be much simpler to get this back into Debian, by
>> simply basing the Debian packaging on Ubuntu's.
>
> To be honest, I doubt that helps, since the hard part is not just making
> packages (my repo on salsa already does that), but making them in a way
> acceptable to debian policy, which is unlikely to be a priority for a
> PPA.

To be fair, the PPA is kept fairly up to date, while I have not updated
my repo on salsa for years. So for personal use on debian, building
from that PPA makes sense. Alternatively, there is also

 https://dfx.at/subsurface-debian/

which is explicitely targetted at debian.

Same issue there, I don't think the author is concerned with making the
package suitable for Debian.

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[Philippe Cerfon]

btw... I've just seen there's:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/subsurface/subsurface/ubuntu
(including packaging for all the deps)

So maybe, it could be much simpler to get this back into Debian, by
simply basing the Debian packaging on Ubuntu's.

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[Philippe Cerfon]

Hey David.

I've just seen your replace from 4 years ago now[0]. O;-)

Are you still working on this? Would love to see subsurface coming
back to Debian, cause right now I think there is not divecomputer/log
software in it at all.

It seems libdivecomputer has also been gone from Debian :-(  ;ay
however also be an advantage - I vaguely remember that Salvo mentioned
subsurface would use its own forked version of that which caused him
quite some pain in maintaining.

Thanks,
Philippe.

[0] Not a coincidence now - I'm planning a bigger dive safari ;-)

Bug#824520: RFP: subsurface -- scuba diving logbook

[Philippe Cerfon]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

* Package name: subsurface
  Version : 4.5.6
  Upstream Author : Dirk Hohndel 
* URL : https://subsurface-divelog.org/
* License : GPL
  Programming Lang: C++
  Description : scuba diving logbook

Apparently, subsurface had previously been packaged for
Debian but got removed (#789875) due to some questionable
wish by upstream (according to their website they consider
distribution packaging "deprecated") as well as the problems
that were caused by libgit2 having some unstable API.

Now it seems that subsurface is however packaged for most
(all?) other major distros:
https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/subsurface
https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home:Subsurface-Divelog=subsurface
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/subsurface/
https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-misc/subsurface

So I'm kinda missing the point why it shouldn't be possible
to have so for Debian.
AFAICS, upstream has anyway factually forked libgit2 and
libdivecomputer, so these could be used and the problems
mentioned in #789875 would be moot.

As for upstream's wish not to package it:
Well that seems a bit questionable as for the general open
source / distros model.
Right now, upstream doesn't even seem to provide packages
for Debian but suggests people to use their Ubuntu packages.
Also, it seems simply plain wrong to encourage not to use a
proper package management system here - Debian users
loose any security support and a secure way to get the
software not to talk about proper Debian integration and
community support.

Cheers.