Bug#587007: salome: Porting patches to Salome 5.1.4 for upstream inclusion

[Andre Espaze]

Package: salome
Version: 5.1.3-10
Severity: wishlist

Last week, Nicolas Chauvat, Sylvestre Ledru, Christophe Trophime and
I met some of the Salome upstream developers in Paris (at Logilab).
We presented the current patches [1] on Salomé 5.1.3 for upstream
inclusion. They are not going to be accepted for this release however most
of them have certainly good chances if they get ported to the upcoming
Salomé 5.1.4. We were invited to try by using the up-to-date version
[2].  I have started to have a look on the main modules, KERNEL, GUI,
GEOM, MED, SMESH and VISU and it seems that most of the patches are
still relevant even if they need to be updated.

However two important maintenance points should be considered when
porting actual patches to the future Salomé 5.1.4. The first is that the
'\*-build-in-tree.patch' family is very unlikely to be accepted. The
packaging process should instead configure, build and install each
module one by one like in the official way. Happily, this advice fits
also one of the Denis Barbier's suggestion for reducing the hard disk
space during Salome building by cleaning every module built directory
after its installation. Would the upstream request be an accelerator
for reorganizing the construction steps?
The second issue is the Debian constraint to build Salome with a HDF5 
library needing MPI. The corresponding patches (kernel-hdf5-needs-mpi.patch,
kernel-mpi-includes.patch, kernel-mpi-libs.patch and so on) are
not so welcomed by upstream. Hopefully an alternative way of using
HDF5 may be provided as suggested by Sylvestre:
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=576004

In conclusion what could be the organization for welcoming the future
Salome 5.1.4 release? Should it be progressively ported on a separate
branch by using the up-to-date sources [2]? Or would you prefer a one-shot
transition from 5.1.3? In order to ease the upstream acceptance, I plan
to write a small report in French for explaining every patch purpose
(for the 5.1.3 version, I already did one for KERNEL and GUI modules
but its delivery is finally delayed).

With kind regards,

André

[1] Found in debian/patches of 
    http://git.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/salome.git 
[2] The sources can be obtained with git 
    http://git.salome-platform.org/gitweb/