Note about the 0install Debian package

I got a notice recently saying that my 0install package had been
removed from Debian/testing, and after searching around a bit I found
this:

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=934872

The Debian OCaml team had removed both the obus and lwt_glib packages
which we use, as well as several of their dependencies. This is to
ease the future transition from OCaml 4.05 to 4.08 apparently
(although both removed packages work fine on 4.08). The maintainer
says "I expect it will take a few months before obus is in testing
again.".

I have now got the 0install package building again, by vendoring the
five missing libraries (camlp4, lwt_camlp4, type_conv, obus and
lwt_glib). It took a bit longer than expected because various hacks
are needed for the MIPS architecture (which I don't much care about,
but it prevents packages from migrating from unstable to testing).

The package will have to be updated again once the OCaml 4.08
transition actually happens, but it should be much easier then because
either the packages we need will be back, or at least we can vendor
modern versions that use dune. For a dune package, simply dropping the
package's source code inside 0install's source directory is enough to
make 0install use it.

The removal of the dependencies also happened just before the Ubuntu
Debian-import freeze, and I thought we'd be stuck with a broken
package in Ubuntu, but the package seems to have updated by itself to
the fixed version despite the freeze.

In the longer term, we should try to make it easier to import packages
from opam into Debian. It's amazing the amount of volunteer time
Debian consumes in the process of taking tested and working packages
from upstream and breaking them :-(


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talex5 (GitHub/Twitter)        http://roscidus.com/blog/
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