Greetings, Fellow Debichemists,
Package: libopenms1
Version: 1.9.0-2
Severity: serious
OpenMS upstream does not provide a stable ABI of libOpenMS. So neither
the patch to add one nor this package name are appropriate.
I am back to you about this bug. After a few mails exchanged with the
OpenMS crew (Oliver Kohlbacher, specifically), I ended coming out with
the following reasoning:
1 - OpenMS is a well-respected project that has an interesting user
base;
2 - While the library is functionally stable (that is, it provides
features that perform fine), it is not stable in the ABI stability
sense;
3 - In the context of Debian, ABI stability is crucial for
largely-used libraries because it avoids having to recompile all
the packages that depend on the libraries each time
new ABI-breaking versions are released;
4 - Availability of mass spectrometry packages in Debian is almost
NULL, since my project to bring to Debichem a complete set of such
packages is still in its infancy. Therefore, at the moment, there
is not a single source package that depends on libopenms;
5 - New versions of OpenMS are released at a pretty low rate, and I
would think that this fact somehow limits the negative impact of
having ABI breakage between versions. Thus, it might be perfectly
possible to have a new soname version each time a new release is
done;
6 - The authors of OpenMS state that ABI stability of libopenms is not
their immediate priority and that they do not intend to change
anything about it;
7 - I think that, because OpenMS is a powerful library aimed at
allowing people to craft flexible mass data analysis workflows, we
should accept the impact of ABI instability in favour of providing
users with a properly-packaged library. For those present at my
FOSDEM2013 talk [0], remember that the OpenMS software
(2 libraries, 114 binaries) is huge and that the few mass
spectrometrists I spoke with about packaging it told me that they
could not even build it! I really think it is of primary
importance to have that software packaged in Debian.
[0] https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/mass_spectrometry_debian/
After having said all this, I remain with a question : is this sound,
or is this totally unreasonable?
Thank you for your input on this subject.
Cheers,
Filippo
--
Filippo Rusconi, PhD - public crypto key C78F687C @ pgp.mit.edu
Researcher at CNRS and Debian Developer lopi...@debian.org
Author of ``massXpert'' at http://www.massxpert.org
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