Debian packaging for JuliaAstro?

[Ole Streicher]

Hi all,

I am writing you on behalf of the Debian Astronomy Team. We package and maintain astronomical software for the Debian distribution. Our goal is to create a "Debian Astro Pure Blend", a Debian system specifically configured with preselected packages for astronomers. Our web page is

http://blends.debian.org/astro

Julia is a new programming language suited for scientific calculations. Currently, we have Julia 0.4.3 in our testing distribution.
It may be useful to get the JuliaAstro software packaged as Debian packages, like we do it f.e. for Python (like astropy). Having JuliaAstro packaged for Debian would make your efforts more visible and therefore also help you getting your approach to a success. Unfortunately, I don't use Julia myself, and I have no experiences with it. But maybe someone on this list would volunteer? We could help you getting the package into Debian; for astronomy we have a specific mailing list where we can help with all packaging questions. For Julia specific problems, there is a Julia packaging team which could support you as well.

Best regards

Ole

[Kyle Barbary]

Hi Ole,

Good to hear from you here, and thanks for all the astro packaging work you’ve done! I think packaging some Debian Julia Astro packages would be great, if someone else has the interest. I’ll point out a few aspects of Julia and JuliaAstro relevant for packaging:

• Unlike astropy, which is a single large package with many subpackages, JuliaAstro consists of separate packages. E.g., FITSIO, WCS, and Cosmology are separately installable Julia packages.
• The default package installation mechanism installs packages into a user’s home directory, under ~/.julia/vX.Y/. I imagine debian Julia packages would install into a location like /usr/share/julia/site/vX.Y, as Julia seems to look here for packages by default.
• For binary dependencies, such as libcfitsio, libwcs, liberfa, the Julia packages FITSIO, WCS and ERFA use standard shared libraries. In fact, we can configure the existing Julia Astro packages to use apt-get to install the shared library dependencies when on debian-based systems. (This hasn’t yet been done, but is a few line change.) Thus, the existence of these debian packages already takes away much of the installation pain: users type Pkg.add("FITSIO") and will be prompted to enter sudo credentials to install libcfitsio via apt-get if it’s not found. However, it would still be beneficial to be able to install the Julia package itself system-wide, so I think this is still worth pursuing.

For any interested Julians, a good first step would be to add an AptGet provider to the build scripts in FITSIO, WCS and ERFA, so that we’re at least using the available debian shared library packages.

— Kyle

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