Fernando Perez wrote:

Hi all,

I just wanted to mention this I ran across:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070724-ars-at-ubuntu-live-new-launchp...

It sounds like it could provide an interesting, low-overhead solution for hosting .debs. I know Andrew (at least) has hosted his privately, but this appears to lower the logistical bar for others to do the same without having to know quite as much about deb packaging as Andrew does.

I have not used the system, just read the description in your link. My quick thoughts - the scripts (debian folder) to build numpy and scipy packages are already done, since numpy and scipy are available. So this part is not really important. - building automatically debian packages regularly (say once a week) would be useful, but this needs some kind of SVN tarball, or any other thing which can provide the sources. Launchpad normally integrate through bzr, and a plugin to import svn from bzr is available (I use it myself, and I could import numpy and scipy repositories into bzr for something like 6 months now; having a public bzr mirror of numpy and scipy would be great: this is so much better than svn in any way for middle-size project like scipy). The above point, regular release tarball, would be a great help for me for the packaging I've done using the OpenSuse build system (http://software.opensuse.org/download/home:/ashigabou/ for the packages, http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service for description), since it would avoid the backporting of features from svn to make released scipy sill buildable with last numpy. To go further, I think the meta-data to build deb and rpm should be part of numpy and scipy (eg releases and repository). I am in the camp of people who believe packaging is better done by people invovled in the development of the said software. cheers, David