Debian package?

[olebole]

Hi,

I am a Debian Developer and involved in the Debian Astro Team. Our goal is to package the relevant software to make Debian a perfect base for astrophysical investigations. We work on the "Debian Astro Pure Blend", a subsystem designated to collect and categorize astronomy related packages.

I think that amuse would perfectly fit here, and it would benefit from an automated and wide distribution within Debian, from where it would automatically migrate to Ubuntu, Mint, and other dependent distributions.

Therefore my question is if you would have the interest to create a Debian package for amuse? If you would package it, we would be glad to help you when you run into problems. Once the package is ready, we could upload it to the Debian archive. We have a mailing list, which I would recommend to subscribe, since this is our main information exchange.

Please feel free to contact me on any questions or comments.

Best regards

Ole

[spzwart]

Dear Ole,

Thanks for the suggestion and offered help. we are in the process op running amuse under Simgularity with the hope that this makes instsllation much easier. the number of dependancies is quite large. making it a deb package could be an intetesting option. which we will dicuss in the team.

sincerely, simon

[teuben]

it's been over a year.... curious minds like to know where this has gone.

[rieder]

Hi @teuben, We have been mainly working to make AMUSE easier to install via pip, as individual packages. I see this as required groundwork for making other installation methods (e.g. debian packages, anaconda) feasible. I think it will not be much effort to create such packages for someone who knows how they work - but that someone is not (yet) me... One problem is that AMUSE requires a choice between MPI flavours (or MPI-less) very early on. If e.g. OpenMPI would be installed, then also amuse-framework-openmpi, amuse-ph4-openmpi etc should be installed. I am not sure how package managers would handle this, though I'm sure they can do this.

[olebole]

@rieder if you at some point think that a Debian package would be a good idea, I't be happy to help you to get it ready. Concering MPI (or not): Is there a reason to offer these alternatives to the end user? Otherwise, I would recommend to unconditionally use the "best" option that is available f.e. in Debian for all users. That is one advantage of integrating into Debian Astro: one can actually rely on the system properties. On the other side, dependency handling is one of the strong sides of (Debian) package management, so I am sure we can handle choices as well.

[spzwart]

Dear Ole (and Peter), It would be great to have AMUSE as debian package. Maybe Martijn Wilhelm is interested in helping with this.

[rieder]

@rieder if you at some point think that a Debian package would be a good idea, I't be happy to help you to get it ready.

Thank you @olebole! I do think it would be great to have.

Concering MPI (or not): Is there a reason to offer these alternatives to the end user? Otherwise, I would recommend to unconditionally use the "best" option that is available f.e. in Debian for all users. That is one advantage of integrating into Debian Astro: one can actually rely on the system properties.

We generally don't want to force people to choose one of OpenMPI/MPICH, since they may (and if they are using AMUSE, likely do) have a preference based on other software they're using. Using MPI is definitely preferable to not doing so in the current version of AMUSE, so offering an MPI-free package would not be necessary in my opinion.

On the other side, dependency handling is one of the strong sides of (Debian) package management, so I am sure we can handle choices as well.

Ok, that would be great!