Babel Debian Package Current Status

This page documents my effort to package the Babel SIDL compiler for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.  The upstream authors are at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Why a Debian package? Being able to type, "apt-get install babel" is a lot easier than downloading, compiling and installing the source. Also, this package puts the various files in their standard Debian places, and includes documentation metadata to link the Babel documentation from Debian doc-base frontends. But perhaps most importantly, having a Debian package formalizes the process of packaging software which uses Babel and SIDL on Debian (as the other packages would just Build-Depend on babel, sidl, python2.2-babel, etc.), and if it lives up to its to its promise, that could be quite a lot of important scientific software.

Package description:

• babel-0.8.8 has the SIDL compiler itself, which consists of the babel-0.8.8.jar Java archive in /usr/share/java following the (proposed) Debian Java policy, and the /usr/bin/babel script which runs it, along with the /usr/share/babel-0.8.8 directory which contains sidl.sidl, the .dtd files, and the repository subdirectory.
• libsidl0.8.8-java has the sidl-0.8.8.jar runtime Java archive file.
• libsidl0.8.8* has the C runtime shared library.
• libsidl-dev* has the C runtime static library, headers, symlinks, and babel-config script needed to develop against the shared library.
• python2.3-babel* has the python runtime modules and headers.
• babel-0.8.8-doc has all of the documentation which ships with the source (ps, pdf, ppt), along with Debian doc-base metadata so this documentation is indexed in frontends like dhelp and dwww.

Questions/issues:

1. With the original makefile, the package build fails while makeing the force-jarfile target in the compiler subdirectory. This is because of bug 170059 in kaffe, whose jar uf function is broken.

   In packages from release 0.7.4-2, the makefile is patched to solve this problem. Upstream knows about this issue, and after 0.8.4, will probably incorporate something like this workaround.

   UPDATE: upstream has fixed this in 0.8.4 so only jar c is used.

2. It would be nice if variables like docdir and jardir could be defined during the configure process, that would cut down considerably on the patch size. At some point I'll probably generate a patch for upstream.
3. The babel source ships with several other .jar files which it seems to need. However, it builds just fine using standard Debian versions of these, such as gnu.getopt-1.0.9.jar in the libgetopt-java package, and xerxesImpl-2.4.0.jar in the libxerxes2-java package, and as of 0.8.6 xml-apis.jar from the libxalan2-java package. The other three (jcert-X.jar, jnet-X.jar and jsse-X.jar) are from the Sun JDK, which is not distributable in Debian free, but is necessary only for babel to access the Alexandria component repository. At some point I'll patch aclocal.m4 to look in the Java archive directory (see previous point) for getopt and xerces, and the babel script to detect the SUN .jar files at runtime (so the babel package can Suggest the Sun JDK, and live with or without it), and send these patches upstream.

To do (in roughly decreasing order of priority):

• Get babel working with gcj-3.3/kaffe, and close bugs 197090 and 209283!
• Make a dummy babel package which depends on new versions of the packages to smooth upgrades.
• Version the libsidl-dev and python2.3-babel packages and have them use alternatives to avoid filename collisions, to complete the enabling of multiple versions installation.
• Write a better manpage for /usr/bin/babel and contribute it upstream.
• Test the babel package with the hello example provided.