[Debichem-devel] Updating openbabel

[Michael Banck]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 09:42:32AM +0200, Andrius Merkys wrote:
> Dear Alex,
> 
> On 03/11/2018 08:23 PM, Alex Mestiashvili wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > The latest official release of openbabel is 2.4.1 which was released
> > more then a year ago ( on 2016-10-10). The versions in stable and
> > testing is 2.3.2 which is more then five years old.
> 
> according to https://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openbabel.html, the
> current release of OpenBabel (2.4.1) is already in testing.

That's not what I see on that page, 2.4.1 is only in experimental so
far. I agree it's a TODO item to upload it to unstabl.

> > If for whatever reason upstream doesn't want to create releases, do you
> > think it is feasible to start uploading current snapshots? I can imagine
> > a version like 2.4.90~beta1~gitc4c05d7c for example.
> 
> I suggest asking the upstream about the release, possibly on their
> GitHub issue tracker. 

AFAIK there's plans to do a 3.0 release at some point this year, but I
don't think there's a concrete release roadmap/timeframe yet.

> Maybe there is a major problem preventing the release. Packing
> possibly unstable (in development) snapshot of OpenBabel does not seem
> a good idea to me. I use OpenBabel a lot and even the transition from
> 2.3.2 to 2.4.1 has been quite difficult to adapt to (my colleagues and
> I are currently working on a manuscript describing the problems we ran
> into). In short, perception of some of the inorganic compounds has
> changed quite radically.

Ouch.
 
> > Alternatively will it make sense to create openbabel-beta or
> > openbabel-git packages with more frequent updates?
> 
> I have not seen such practice in Debian. However, I am relatively new
> here.

There's a few foo-snapshot packages, but I would like to avoid that.

Maybe we can upload 2.4.1 to unstable finally, and upload a few git
snapshots to experimental so people can check that out in preperation of
3.0?


Michael