Dear Team Comrades, Upon blessing from Ghislain Antony Vaillant (previous team maintainer) and Chris Rorden (upstream, CCed) I would like to take over the maintenance of dcm2niix. And I would like to do it largely by taking the dcm2niix packaging setup we have in NeuroDebian.
bits of history - we have initially packaged dcm2niix long ago (Sep 2015) but forgot to file an ITP because there were a number of outstanding license issues to be resolved before considering for "Debian proper". - Rightfully so, without seeing an ITP, Ghislain provided separate packaging in Dec 2016. - I don't remember at which stage licensing issues got resolved ;) and that is when I realized that there is already a package in Debian. so we started to talk with Ghislain in Jan 2017 about possibly merging the effort, but never converged. Chris asked me to take over maintenance in Debian as well, and Ghislain blessed me as well. To minimize amount of work for myself, I would like to continue with NeuroDebian packaging, just polishing it up (copyright file and may be some cleanup). How NeuroDebian packaging is different (dropping historical perspective) ATM it is at http://github.com/neurodebian/dcm2niix - main difference is our git repo sitting on top of the upstream so we also can produce an .orig. tarball with dcm_qa submodule which provides data for testing of correct operation. That increases the tarball size but IMHO it is worth it! - we run (build-time only ATM) tests using that dcm_qa/ data. That already allowed to iron out differences in behavior between i386 and amd64. I expect though that testing for all the other platforms would open a huge can of worms. But I think it would be beneficial in the long run to name them all ;) I bet Chris (the upstream) would be "thrilled" to help nailing them down any objections on relying on gbp to produce orig source tarballs? - in a rush toward "let's converge packaging" I have added needed then epoch 1: to the versioning. It would need to "propagate" into Debian. I hope that is ok - we still use debhelper 9 for maximal ease of backportability. any objections? - we do carry a few patches https://github.com/neurodebian/dcm2niix/tree/debian/debian/patches including patches for the packaging backports on elderly jessie (and equally old ubuntus) https://github.com/neurodebian/dcm2niix/blob/debian/debian/patches/jessie-dsc-patch probably some symlinks for really old /EOLed ubuntus could be removed, will do now But any objections against carrying backport patches? Please let me know what you think -- Yaroslav O. Halchenko Center for Open Neuroscience http://centerforopenneuroscience.org Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755 Phone: +1 (603) 646-9834 Fax: +1 (603) 646-1419 WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik