Last week, a new release of Code_Aster entered Debian unstable.
Code_Aster is a finite element solver
for partial differential equations in mechanics, mainly developed by EDF
R&D
(Électricité de France). It is arguably one of the most feature
complete free software available in this domain.
Aster has been in Debian
since 2012 thanks to the work of debian-science team. Yet it has always
been somehow a problematic package with a couple of persistent Release
Critical (RC) bugs (FTBFS, instalability issues) and actually never
entered a stable release of Debian.
Logilab has committed to improving
Code_Aster for a long time in various areas, notably through the
LibAster friendly fork, which aims at turning the
monolithic Aster into a library, usable from Python.
Recently, the EDF
R&D team in charge of the development of Code_Aster took several major
decisions, including:
- the move to Bitbucket forge as
a sign of community opening (following the path opened by
LibAster that
imported the code of Code_Aster into a Mercurial repository) and,
- the change of build system from a custom makefile-style architecture
to a fine-grained Waf system (taken
from that of LibAster).
The latter obviously led to significant changes on the Debian packaging
side, most of which going into a sane direction: the debian/rules
file slimed down from 239 lines to 51 and a bunch of tricky install-step
manipulations were dropped leading to something much simpler and
closer to upstream (see #731211 for
details). From upstream perspective, this re-packaging effort based on
the new build-system may be the opportunity to update the installation
scheme (in particular by declaring the Python library as private).
Clearly, there's still room for improvements on both side (like building
with the new metis library,
shipping several versions of Aster stable/testing, MPI/serial). All in
all, this is good for both Debian users and upstream developers. At
Logilab, we hope that this effort will
consolidate our collaboration with EDF R&D.
