[Coin-discuss] Some problems on experimental coin-or fedora package

[Ted Ralphs]

Hi Paulo,

Thanks very much for your e-mail. I am switching the conversation over the
CoinBinary project mailing list (I just realized that the project's XML
page says that the mailing list for the project is coin-discuss---I will
update that). One of the goals of the CoinBinary project (and of the
creation of the CoinALl package) since the beginning has been to make it
possible to put together packages for Linux distributions (as well as
installers for other platforms). We have made a lot of changes to the build
system in recent years to support this eventual goal, but have lacked the
manpower to follow through in doing the packaging. I'll try to answer some
of your questions below, but we will probably have to have a bit of back
and forth to work everything out.

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Paulo César Pereira de Andrade <
paulo.cesar.pereira.de.andrade at gmail.com> wrote:

>   Hi,
>
>   I made an experimental coin-or package, at first from the CoinAll
> tarball,
> any feedback is welcome, e.g. if it is really desirable to make a package
> for
> every sub project, for easier updates, etc (I am more friendly to CoinAll
> because it is supposed to be tested that all bits work together).
>


The purpose of CoinAll was exactly this. For reasons we can discuss in more
detail, I think it is best to have a separate package for each project
(CoinUtils, Clp, Cbc, etc.). We have made a number of design choices with
the build system to support this.


>   Running fedora-review on the package I see these fatal errors:
>
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/miplib3/AUTHORS
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/miplib3/LICENSE
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/Netlib/README
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/Sample/AUTHORS
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/Sample/LICENSE
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/Netlib/LICENSE
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/miplib3/README
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/Sample/README
> coin-or.x86_64: E: zero-length /usr/share/coin/doc/Data/Netlib/AUTHORS
>
>   Maybe those were supposed to be symbolic links?
>

The data projects are strange beasts---they consist of data files that are
part of widely distributed test sets. The origin of many of the files is
difficult to ascertain, so creating AUTHORS, README, and even LICENSE files
is difficult. We have had on our long-term TODO list to come up with a
solution for this, but in any case, they are not necessary for anything
else to work---they are mainly there for unit testing. We made them
separate projects to keep them isolated (to keep the provenance of other
projects cleaner) and to make it possible to choose whether to install them
more easily.


>   The warnings from fedora-review are issues that I can easily handle,
> for example, \r\n line endings on some files, sources with executable bit
> set, etc. These may be of special interest:
>
> coin-or.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary cbc
> coin-or.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary blis
> coin-or.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary symphony
> coin-or.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary clp
> coin-or.x86_64: W: no-manual-page-for-binary OSSolverService
>
> help2man is not of much use for these, but it should be easy to create
> simple manpages based on documentation.
>

Yes, this should be asy to do.


>   Another issue, I see that the COIN-OR-1.6.2-linux-x86_64-gcc4.4.5.tar.gz
> tarball does not distribute the AUTHORS, README and LICENSE files,
> but does distribute several pdf files. I do not see a make target to create
> those, but I may be missing something trivial.
>

You are correct that there is no target to create the PDF files that are
part of these, but we could create a target for that pretty easily. I'm not
sure what you mean about the tarball not distributing AUTHORS, README, etc.
Those should be installed for each project in the /share/doc directory.


> The initial package is at:
> Spec: http://fedorapeople.org/~pcpa/coin-or.spec
> SRPM: http://fedorapeople.org/~pcpa/coin-or-1.6.0-1.fc19.src.rpm


Keep us posted and we'll be happy to help in whatever way we can.

Ted
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor, Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted
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