debian packages

[mhagdorn]

Hi Andreas,
I have forked the repo to add a debian package for easy installation on raspbian systems: https://github.com/TeamPiccolo/python-seabreeze
Happy to to contribute this back if you are interested.
magnus

[ap--]

Hi Magnus,

Do you have some installation instruction for that?
Or is this already contributed to some package index and I just apt install?

Cheers,
Andreas

[mhagdorn]

python2 support is really up to us. I would drop it. So maybe the way forward would be to undbundle the library and package it separately. I can ask the debian science packagers what the best way forward is and report back. I am obviously happy to help with the packaging.

[ap--]

Hi Magnus,

Sorry for the slow response times, I'm currently going through my todo backlog.
Having thought about this more, I think I like the idea of offering python-seabreeze in debian. Allthough I personally think that code like python-seabreeze should not be run by the operating system provided python and rather use a user managed python environment, I am however interested in seeing how the whole debian package distribution thing works.

So here are the things I think we need to get done / clarify before we get started:

• drop python2.x and <=python3.5 support from seabreeze (I'll push a branch soon)
• verify python3.10 compatibility (This should already work, I just want to have that verified before)
• clarify if it would be okay to ship with a statically linked libseabreeze (if not, this will require a bit of refactoring to allow dynamically linked builds, and backporting of changes to libseabreeze)
• clarify how optional dependencies work (python-seabreeze can either run with cseabreeze or pyseabreeze)
• clarify how udev rules would be shipped in debian (I currently provide a userlevel script to install them, but I would assume debian ships them in debs)
• clarify which versions of debian we are targeting
• clarify which architectures we are targeting (or are these all that debian supports?)

Since this is not too urgent 🦥 and it's summer 🌻 let's aim for having these things done within the next 3 months.
I would make a github project and we'd organize there. What do you think?

[mhagdorn]

Hi Andreas,
yes. That sounds like a good plan. Trying to get a package into a distribution is a good exercise to tidy things up. I think we should aim to dynamically link libseabreeze. debian supports many architectures so support for multiple architectures is something we should get out of the box. Once we get the packages into debian they will go into unstable and from there they will migrate to testing (which will eventually become the next stable version) and it might get backported to the current stable. Ubuntu will also pick up packages from unstable and integrate into their distribution. So all round a good learning experience. I will contact the debian science mailing list.

[ap--]

Great 👍
I just signed up on debian-science too.
And I'll create the project etc later this week.
Have a great day!

[mhagdorn]

excellent - with regards to your question on how to handle optional dependencies: I would split python-seabreeze into three packages: a frontend and the two backends. They can live in the same directory/git repository but they will get packaged separately. The backends would depend on the frontend and I think the frontend would recommend one of the backends. The backends then handle their own dependencies.