[pkg-fgfs-crew] Considering removal of simgear from testing

[Niels Thykier]

On 2011-07-20 22:02, Christopher Baines wrote:
> Hello All,
> 

Hi,

CC'ing the FlightGear maintainers... I should have done in the first
email.  For the newcomers, the thread starts at:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2011/07/msg00249.html
(it was also bounced to the RC bugs afterwards)

Short recap is I have been considering to remove simgear and its reverse
dependencies (fgrun, flightgear and fgfs-atlas) from testing due to the
openscenegraph migration and some old RC bugs against simgear, where
there has been no (visible) maintainer feedback.

> I am the uploader for the fgrun package and have played about with the
> FlightGear related packages in Debian. I believe that both of #556348
> and #622059 can be fixed quite easily, but using the upstream source as
> is, simgear cannot be built with libopenscenegraph-dev 3.0.0-2 (I can
> build it with 2.8.3-7). 
> 

Thanks, that does explain the lastest RC bug.  :)

> Now, the next FlightGear release (and thus simgear release) will happen
> very soon. In the words of one developer, they are currently on the
> "final approach" (pun probably intended)[1].

Do you know what the (expected) time of arrival is on this?  [1]
suggests either it is late or it will not be out for another month or two.
  If it is the latter, is the current branch stable enough for a
pre-release?

> I intend to try and package
> this new release, but it will be slow as I have not started yet and I
> intend to pretty much start from scratch in terms of packaging. This is
> because I want to experiment with using git for the packaging (because
> upstream uses git to manage the source code), also, upstream does not
> support building simgear as a set of shared libraries. 
> 

The "debian/deps.py" script might also need a multi-arch awareness patch.

> So, as I understand it, if you want version 3.0.0 of openscenegraph in
> testing, you might need to remove simgear and the other packages in the
> mean time, until I (or someone else) can update them? 
> 

Yes, I am considering to do that.

The long story is that we cannot rebuild simgear to pick up the new
version openscenegraph libraries (due to the FTBFS bugs), so
openscenegraph cannot migrate since it would make simgear (and the rest)
uninstallable in testing.

Basically we have two options at this point; either we remove simgear
and its reverse (build-)dependencies.  This way, openscenegraph would
not make simgear+flightgear uninstallable (in testing) and it would
migrate normally in a few days.
  Unfortunately solution punishes fgrun and fgfs-atlas for depending on
simgear.

The preferred alternative is that all the FTBFS bugs in simgear and
flightgear are fixed and simgear + flightgear rebuilt against the new
openscenegraph libraries.  In this case openscenegraph would have to
wait until simgear + flightgear are ready to migrate, but then they
would migrate together.

If you can provide a reasonable estimate/plan for when simgear and
flightgear will be fixed, we can probably wait for it.


> Thanks,
> 
> Chris
> 
> P.S: I would like to very much thank Christian Kastner for emailing me
> about this so I was aware of it, as I was not subscribed to this list (I
> do now). 
> 

Sorry about that.  I was reminded by Philipp Kern earlier that it might
have been a good idea to also send the mail to maintainers/the RC bugs.

> 1:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg33220.html
> 
> 

~Niels

[1]
http://wiki.flightgear.org/index.php/Release_Plan#Detailed_Time_Schedule_and_Checklist