Babel Debian
Package Current Status
Adam Powell, last modified December 6, 2008 for version
1.2.0.dfsg-7
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This page documents my effort to package the
Babel SIDL
compiler for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The upstream
authors are at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
Why a Debian package? Being able to type, "apt-get install babel" is a lot
easier than downloading, compiling and installing the source. Also, this
package puts the various files in their standard Debian places, and includes
documentation metadata to link the Babel documentation from Debian doc-base
frontends. But perhaps most importantly, having a Debian package allows
other Debian packages to depend on Babel and SIDL. In the near future, such
packages will include hypre and PETSc, and if Babel lives up to its to its
promise, there could be quite a lot more.
Package description:
The babel source package builds six binary packages:
- babel-1.2.0 has the SIDL compiler itself, which consists
of the babel-1.2.0.jar Java archive in /usr/share/java
following the
(proposed)
Debian Java policy, and the /usr/bin/babel script which runs
it, along with the /usr/share/babel-1.2.0 directory which
contains sidl.sidl, the .dtd files, and
the repository subdirectory.
- libsidl1.2.0-java has the sidl-1.2.0.jar runtime
Java archive file.
- libsidl1.2.0* has the C runtime shared library.
- libsidl-dev* has the C runtime static library, headers,
symlinks, and babel-config script needed to develop against the
shared library.
- python-sidl* has the python runtime modules and
headers.
- babel-doc has all of the documentation which ships with
the source (ps, pdf, ppt), along with Debian doc-base metadata so
this documentation is indexed in frontends like dhelp and
dwww.
*Architecture-dependent packages.
Questions/issues:
- It would be nice if variables like docdir and jardir
could be defined during the configure process, that would cut down
considerably on the patch size. At some point I'll probably generate a
patch for upstream.
- The babel source ships with several other .jar files,
but builds just fine using standard Debian versions of these. At some
point I'll patch aclocal.m4 to look in the Java archive directory
(see previous point) for getopt and xerces, and send
these patches upstream.
To do (in roughly decreasing order of priority):
- Make a babel-test package from the regression subdir and test all of the
babel features using this package.
- Write a better manpage for /usr/bin/babel and contribute it
upstream.
Adam
Powell