[Rivet] Package Rivet for Debian

[Andy Buckley]

On 08/04/11 14:30, Hendrik Hoeth wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thus spake Lifeng Sun (lifongsun at gmail.com):
> 
>> I am the Debian [1] maintainer of CERNLIB [2], which contains some
>> ancient and obsolete high energe physics libraries, e.g. Herwig-5.9,
>> so that I intend to introduce some new HEP packages, such as PYTHIA8,
>> FastJet, Rivet, ThePEG, HepMC and CLHEP, into Debian. What do you
>> think if I package Rivet for Debian? The GUIDELINES will be respected.
> 
> I guess you want to make one package per project, right?
> 
> I don't think CLHEP is needed anymore. That pretty much falls into the
> "ancient" category.

Ancient, but still very used, unfortunately. And it is being maintained.
It would still be a useful package, I think, at least since the LHC
experiments, Geant4, etc. etc. all depend on it!

> About Rivet, I second what Frank wrote. And if you need to make any
> Debian specific changes, please let us know and send us the patches so
> that we can consider including them in the upstream code.

Yes, please do!

Regarding HepMC, can I request that the latest version be packaged,
rather than the 2.03.xx version that the LHC experiments are still stuck
on? Just to encourage users to upgrade: the newer versions are much more
useful for Rivet!

One final comment... almost totally unrelated to your message! I was in
touch with the ROOT developers a while ago about the version of ROOT in
Debian/Ubuntu: it is (or at least was) very out of date a few months
ago, and they were lamenting that they couldn't do anything about it. I
don't know if you know who maintains the ROOT deb packages, but it's
probably better either to have it really kept up to date or to be
removed entirely so that the old packages don't clash with user
installations of the SVN head / latest stable release.

Thanks for getting in touch... please let us know if we can help, and as
Hendrik says we're more than happy to backport any fixes needed for
packaging into our releases :)

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley
SUPA Advanced Research Fellow
Particle Physics Experiment Group, University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.