Hello, If I can remember correctly, one reason we are doing this Debian packaging is that we find not all but many packages not ultimately straight-forward to compile. It is not the "configure && make install" that bothers us, but the manifold dependencies and dependencies of those dependencies that also need to be maintained. And this effort can be shared, obviously.
Now, for a single binary I would not mind, but we are about to transition all our "evolving routine" workflows over to the University's central HPC cluster . And the suggestion is to just recompile what one needs and automate that recompilation if it is any cumbersome - somewhat surprisingly they did not say "package it". It is some Jessie-analogous CentOS, i.e. not a .deb distro and they feature the typical module environments to get functionality in and out, together with slurm. Would it be worthwhile to try installing the packages to $HOME/debroot as with | dpkg-deb -x app.deb $HOME/debroot| and fiddle with the $PATH environment not too different from how module is doing it? This would certainly raise my interest in backports. Our next (first real) meeting is on Thursday. Docker and chroot environments will certainly be discussed. We could also just not completely migrate everything but constrain ourselves, e.g., on short read alignments, and self-compile those "typical suspect" binaries only. Not ideal. What do you folks do out there? Just not bother and use some commercial cloud service? There would be single VMware instances for us, but not tens or hundreds as in OpenStack or Eucalyptus. I presume that this situation is rather common and I would very much like to hear your opinions/experiences about it. Cheers, Steffen
