Re: ROOT and repositories

Hi Thiemo,

   Christian did a humongous amount of work to package ROOT for Debian, with the package files nicely spread out all over the system as the Debian folks like it (just look at the incredible amount of scripts and packaging snippets in root/build/package/debian). We went to tremendous auditing, and solved all real and perceived licensing issues, to make sure ROOT is really "Open Source" and could be accepted by the Debann high priests. And still all we got in return was the distribution is debian-experimental, or something like that, of some old out-of-date ROOT version, causing us, and our users, more problems than benefits.

But if you want to give it another try, please be our guest.

Cheers, Fons.

On 29/03/10 18:00, Thiemo Nagel wrote:
> Dear Axel,
>
> Axel Naumann wrote:
>> We, the ROOT team, generally have two options:
>> A: encourage other people to regularly provide new packages for the
>> most common distros (Debian being definitely one of them)
>> B: discourage the use of distro packages because they are by
>> definition out of date.
>>
>> I finally ended up where most of my colleagues arrived a long while
>> ago: going for option B.
> >
>> Maybe Debian should simply remove the ROOT packages. Could you try to
>> get that arranged?
>
> (Cc'ing Christian Holm Christensen, the maintainer of Debian's ROOT
> packages.)
>
> Actually, Debian release managers seem to have removed ROOT 5.24 already
> (which initially had been targeted for the upcoming squeeze release).
>
> Personally, I think option A would serve many ROOT users very well
> (especially those who use it only casually) and I'm a bit sad that it
> doesn't look like as if it's going to happen...
>
> Having said that, distributions might be more eager to pick up ROOT if
> it would adhere to standards more (FHS comes to mind...) making
> packaging easier.
>
> Just my 2 cents.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Thiemo
>

-- 
Org:    CERN, European Laboratory for Particle Physics.
Mail:   1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland
E-Mail: Fons.Rademakers_at_cern.ch              Phone: +41 22 7679248
WWW:    http://fons.rademakers.org           Fax:   +41 22 7669640