[Debian-med-packaging] release tags for the smrtanalysis suite (was: pristine-tar data for kineticstools_0.6.1+dfsg.orig.tar.xz)

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hi, Andreas,

على السبت 24 كانون الأول 2016 ‫23:14، كتب Andreas Tille:
> Hi Afif,
> 
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2016 at 09:52:38PM -0800, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
>> Ok. I should document the upstream source retrieval in README.source.
>> Because upstream doesn't want to tag releases,
> 
> You reported this before.

I've reported this several times on several different occcasions, and
even talked to one of their developers when I was at their informatics
developers conference last year.

The best one for this is falcon. They have a FALCON-integrate repository
where releases are consistently and frequently tagged.
https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/FALCON-integrate/releases

The next best is pbcore. Most releases are tagged, but sometimes it lags
behind. For instance, it looks like they now have 1.2.11 while the
latest tag is 1.2.10. I think this one is also available on pypi, so it
might be better to point d/watch there.

pbcommand used to have regular tagged releases until a different PacBio
developer took over most of the development.

The rest is basically like kineticstools. Recently, a homebrew or
linuxbrew packager requested release tags for blasr and this was
accomodated. My comments on it were ignored, though.
https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/blasr/issues/316


>  I now intentionally ignored this and filed an
> upstream issue.  It might help if more and more DDs might get on their
> nerves. :-P
> 

Thanks, but I don't know about this. They are not enthusiastic about our
packaging (see, for instance,
<https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pbcore/issues/21#issuecomment-141742545>)
, so will not go out of their way to make things easier for us. At the
same time, they aren't hostile--just indifferent mostly.

> I think technically release tags are an important part of software
> development and it belongs to our duty to teach upstream who are
> ignoring this since it also affects our work.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/kineticsTools/issues/49
> 

Here are a couple of my requests:

pbcommand:
https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pbcommand/issues/116

pbbam:
https://github.com/PacificBiosciences/pbbam/issues/10

As for contributions, if it is to resolve a bug that affects them, they
will accept patches. If it's something to improve flexibility but does
not really affect them, it gets ignored.

Thanks and regards
Afif

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name