[cctbxbb] Debian Package

[Radostan Riedel]

On Fri, 31. Aug 02:29, Luc Bourhis wrote:
> The most serious issue is timing and funding here. I apologise if what I am going to write sounds blunt to Radostan, Baptiste, Marcin and the others but we are not paid to nicely package the cctbx. I would even go as far as to say that we are not paid to develop the cctbx actually. The guys in Berkeley are funded to develop Phenix; I get a salary from Bruker to write close-source software for them; The Olex2 team can only justify putting work that will shine through Olex2. At times, to meet our tight deadlines, anything goes: we happily make incompatible hacks at the environment we use and we don't have the time to do it nicely and to put the effort to discuss those changes with upstream. As time passes, and more and more code of ours depends on those changes, while upstream has more and more code that becomes incompatible with those changes, it is very likely that it becomes so difficult to change that situation, that it gets frozen for ever. It is everywhere to be seen in the cctbx.
I do understand this. We don't get paid either.
For me this is not an issue although I spent already a few months of work.
I'd be frustrated at first if our efforts would be for nothing
but I can accept this and I'd probably try to work around this somehow.
I've my own projects based on cctbx and I'm really a big fan of cctbx.
But I can't distribute my projects properly without bundling cctbx with it. 
We are building a cascade or snowball system were everyone is bundling one another. 
This leads to chaos.
I already had some weird problems because of the environment variables. 
It's messing up the system in some rare cases!

I contributed for a few free open source projects and from my experience I have to
say it's always good to build and hold a community to benefit from peoples work.
But if this is not what you want and you want to keep your development in
a small circle than it's your choice and we can't do anything about it besides
to fork (which is unrealistic and unlikely).

Again nobody is trying to force you to anything. We are just offering
suggestions and help if this is not needed please be honest with us so we don't
have to spent more time on this.

kind regards
Radi