Hi everyone, I've finally admitted to myself that I have no time to take good care of openbabel: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/openbabel It has one FTBFS bug in rawhide (related to cmake macro changes) and two requests to update. One in Fedora to move to the recent 3.x series and one for EPEL to update from 2.3 to 2.4.
It has 9 consumers in Fedora: avogadro avogadro2 chemtool ghemical gnome-chemistry-utils IQmol kalzium molsketch xdrawchem
Hopefully, one of their maintainers (Bcc'd) or someone from SciTech SIG (Cc'd) can pick this up.
I'll orphan it in a few days if nobody responds here with their FAS ID.
Regards,
Hello Dominik and everyone else,
The next release of Molsketch is going to build against Open Babel 3.x, so I started working on updating the openbabel package around the time version 3.1.1 came out, which supposedly fixed some issues related to packaging on linux. Based on your spec file, I was trying to see which patches were obsolete, what else might be required to get it to build with as many features as possible and then test the "abandonware" that depends on it. Unfortunately (fortunately?), the local lockdown was lifted and I was among the people authorized back in the lab and I got swamped with work, so I didn't get very far. I got the base stuff building at some point, but I had trouble with some runtime dependencies. In the meantime, there's been the CMake change and I don't know if what I got building still does. I am currently on vacation until the last week of August and away from my systems, so I can't test things, or comment on the issues I encountered. That being said, I think that of the packagers involved, I am the least qualified to take up openbabel and I haven't touched RHEL or CentOS in years, so I have no idea what's going on there and what's required to maintain the EPEL branches. I'd be happy to co-maintain the Fedora ones and help out as much as I can. Given the time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, do you think you could hold on to the package a little longer (e.g. until the beginning of September), so that people who are interested might get the chance to get our act together?
Thank you for everything you've done so far, A.
On Thursday, 30 July 2020 at 19:18, Alexander Ploumistos wrote: [...]
Given the time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, do you think you could hold on to the package a little longer (e.g. until the beginning of September), so that people who are interested might get the chance to get our act together?
Sure thing, though I probably won't have time to do anything with the package in the meantime.
Thank you for everything you've done so far,
You're welcome! I've enjoyed maintaining a lot of packages over the years, but it's time to let go of those I have no interest in anymore. Openbabel is one of them.
Regards, Dominik
Hello everyone,
I've finally managed to find some time and get the latest Open Babel snapshot to build in F32 and rawhide. The spec file is ugly with a bunch of comments still in it and I've realized that documentation upstream is lacking, especially concerning build options and bindings. So far, I've enabled only the python bindings and I'm not sure what else is still available. There's also an icon file missing, but that's the least of our problems. If anyone's interested in taking a look, here's a scratch build: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=52775710 I've also set up a copr, where things are still building, though eln builds died almost instantly on all arches and the F32 armhfp builder ran out of space: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/alexpl/openbabel/
Going forward, there's a number of things we need to figure out, off the top of my head: - I suppose I could take over from Dominik (with the hope that not many things will break down in the following year) the packages in Fedora, but not EPEL and friends. Who wants to do that? - Has any of the maintainers of dependent packages that are dead-ish upstream looked at porting them to OB 3? - Do we create a new package, openbabel3, or do we rename the existing one openbabel2? How do we deal with the complications of having both of them around, especially since most of the binaries have the same name?
There were many more things in my head when I started writing this message, but they've somehow evaporated. I'm off to bed, please feel free to chime in.
Best regards, A.
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