Bug 518949 - Review Request: brlcad - computer aided solid modelling and design
Summary: Review Request: brlcad - computer aided solid modelling and design
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: Package Review
Version: rawhide
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Nobody's working on this, feel free to take it
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard: NotReady
: 236856 (view as bug list)
Depends On: 549980 550234
Blocks: FE-DEADREVIEW
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2009-08-24 10:16 UTC by Matt Chan
Modified: 2016-08-13 13:55 UTC (History)
14 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2015-12-04 03:38:01 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Matt Chan 2009-08-24 10:16:40 UTC
Please note this is my first package. I am looking for a sponsor.

Spec URL: http://mattchan.homelinux.net:55555/brlcad/brlcad.spec
SRPM URL: http://mattchan.homelinux.net:55555/brlcad/brlcad-7.14.9.20090823svn-0.fc11.src.rpm
Description: BRL-CAD is a powerful Open Source combinatorial Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) solid modeling system that includes interactive 3D solid geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing support for rendering, geometric analysis, signal-processing tools, path-tracing, and photon mapping support for geometric representation and analysis.

Comment 1 Jason Tibbitts 2009-08-24 14:39:37 UTC
*** Bug 236856 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2 Peter Lemenkov 2009-08-24 14:47:45 UTC
Matt, you're using x86_64 as a marker for 64-bt arch - please, keep in mind, that we also have sparc and ppc64 targets.

I'll post more notes later.

Comment 3 Matt Chan 2009-08-25 07:36:02 UTC
Thanks for the quick comments!

I've made the changes to add sparc64, ppc64, and alpha to the %ifarch operator

The spec file at the link has been updated.

The new SRPM is at http://mattchan.homelinux.net:55555/brlcad/brlcad-7.14.9.20090823svn-1.fc11.src.rpm

Matt

Comment 4 Matt Chan 2009-08-26 20:05:02 UTC
I discovered that the SRPM had a directory name bug when doing a koji build. I've updated the tarball name and rebuilt it. The latest link now points to the correct version. 

Sorry for the inconvenience,
Matt

Comment 5 Kevin Fenzi 2009-09-06 04:28:39 UTC
Hey Matt. 

I took a quick look, and a few things to address before a review: 

1. It looks like your are building some of the internally bundled copies of libraries: 
Build tkhtml3 ........................: yes
Build tkImg ..........................: yes
Build Utah Raster Toolkit.............: yes
Build Template Numerical Toolkit......: yes
Build openNURBS.......................: yes
Build NIST STEP Class Libraries.......: yes

You should use system versions of these, or in cases they don't yet exist in Fedora, submit them for review first. I know tkImg at least is in Fedora already, not sure about the others. 

2. The License tag doesn't appear right... see the Licesing page for the correct tags, and note that "," is not valid. 

3. rpmlint has a number of complaints. Try and address those? 

If you can take a look at those and spin up a new package I can look at reviewing this for you.

Comment 6 Chitlesh GOORAH 2009-10-06 12:08:41 UTC
Ping any progress on this, Matt ?

Comment 7 Matt Chan 2009-10-06 14:32:19 UTC
Ack. I'm sorry, I don't know how, but I missed the email about Kevin's comment. I guess there's a downside to too many bugzilla emails.

I will have some time to work on this in the weekend to fix the license and rpmlint errors. I thought they were only trivial ones, but I didn't test the most recent changes. 

The libraries are somewhat of a sticky issue.

I consulted with the BRL-CAD devs on the possibility of abstracting out the libraries while building this package. It appears that they have made heavy 3rd party modifications to most of these libraries, especially Utah, Template Numerical, openNURBS, and NIST STEP, and the upstream projects are unwilling to accept them or are no longer active. TkHTML is a dead project as far as I know. None of those libraries listed should be present in fedora 11. 

Is it still considered a good idea to abstract out the libraries, or should we just consider them a part of the BRL-CAD package? According to the BRL-CAD devs, they don't really resemble the original libraries/projects anymore. To my knowledge, there is no project outside of BRL-CAD that makes use of their modifications to these libs.

Thoughts?

Matt

Comment 8 Kevin Fenzi 2009-10-06 15:51:13 UTC
Well, the guideline is at: 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries

I really wish projects wouldn't do this kind of thing. It makes it much harder to get them packaged for a distribution. ;(

Comment 9 Matt Chan 2009-10-06 16:08:52 UTC
Hmm that's the first time I've read that page.

So what do we do now? Would applying to FeSCo be appropriate?

This lib problem is also the reason other distributions are having trouble accepting BRL-CAD. (The lib naming problem being the other one. BRL-CAD's been in development for 20 years, so it doens't follow standard naming schemes.)

Matt

Comment 10 Toshio Ernie Kuratomi 2009-10-06 17:03:10 UTC
Could we get some more information on this?  How many libraries are included?  How many are dead upstream and how many won't accept brl-cad's patches?  Where were the patches sent to?

Where the libraries are dead upstream, the best thing to do would be for brl-cad upstream to take over (or release a renamed fork) with their modified versions.  Where the upstreams don't want the changes we should find out why (a) the upstreams don't want them and (b) why brl-cad does.  Then we'd have to decide whether to work with brl-cad to phase out the need for the library, work with the library upstream to clean up the changes for inclusion, or get someone (hopefully brl-cad) to maintain the forked version.

Comment 11 Christopher Sean Morrison 2009-10-06 20:33:16 UTC
We wish we didn't have to do that kind of thing too.  Alas, there is not a universal cross-platform package management system that we can rely on to be default installed cross-platform.  With the exception of openNURBS and NIST SCL, our external dependencies are unmodified and primarily provided as a download convenience for users.

Our build aims hard to "just work" by default, regardless of platform and environment.  We go to great lengths in our build system to perform compilation testing to detect installed libraries and to use them when we can.  Additionally, there are compilation options to force all or individual dependencies on and off so that package management systems can be sure they're getting a system-installed library.  The default is merely "auto-detect".

I'm really not sure what Matt meant by not following standard naming schemes. Is there even such a thing?   The problem has been simple naming conflicts as our core public libraries are sub-projects in themselves with trade mark identity.  The solution there is to install our libraries in a sub-directory (e.g., /usr/lib/brlcad/librt.so) and update the system linker search paths so the conflict is avoided.

To get more specific on our external dependencies and respond to Toshio's request .. here's the list of installable dependencies their status:

tkhtml3: no source changes, build convenience
tkImg: no source changes, build convenience
Utah Raster Toolkit: no upstream, we apply security and build fixes (but otherwise do not modify)
TNT: no source changes (it's only header files)
openNURBS: some source mods, upstream is not interested (competes with their business) 
NIST SCL: no upstream, heavily modified (we'll eventually manage it as a sub-project)

We're using openNURBS in a way that upstream specifically doesn't support.  It's a fantastic library that provides (a) geometric representation and (b) conversion facilities, yet is a subset of their larger commercial Rhino SDK which includes (c) geometric analysis facilities.  We need a, b, and c for the same reasons they did, so we have to implement a portion of what they intentionally remove.  We're looking into ways to refactor our modifications so they are an independent superset (so upstream is unmodified), but that's not where things are at today.

Big thanks and appreciation to Matt Chan for taking this up.  Thanks to everyone else for taking the time to review and critique.  It will be great to see BRL-CAD integrated.

Cheers!
Sean

Comment 12 Nicolas Chauvet (kwizart) 2009-10-06 20:44:05 UTC
There is also a problem with the librt.so from brlcad that may conflicts with the glibc one on linux. Any progress on this side ? (specially using pkg-config will be an easy way to abstract the problem).
At least that was the pending question when I took care of the package some time ago:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=236856

There are also well known duplicates: (took from my spec file).
#Rename wall
#mv $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/wall $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/brlcad-wall
mv $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/dstat $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/brlcad-dstat
mv $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/istat $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_bindir}/brlcad-istat

Comment 13 Christopher Sean Morrison 2009-10-06 21:16:26 UTC
Ah yes, can't forget the *long* efforts of kwizart that started us down this path (thanks to you too Nicolas!)..

The 'wall' command was renamed about 20 months ago.  I don't recall dstat/istat ever being raised as an issue, though.  Do you have a reference link for the istat conflict?  Regardless, dstat and istat are non-critical tools that can be easily renamed.  I'll put it in our queue for the next release (7.16.2).

We provide pkg_config files (as well as a brlcad-config script) so installing libraries into a subdirectory should take care of the librt/libbu/libbn conflicts.

Cheers!
Sean

Comment 14 Matt Chan 2009-12-16 05:29:36 UTC
While creating a package for tkImg, I noticed that they include modified source versions of libz, libpng, libungif, libjpeg, and libtiff (from Aug 2000) so they can be loaded into the tcl/tk core. 

Does anyone care to weigh in on this? Does this count as a violation of Fedora's pre-packaged libraries clause?

TkImg upstream seems to be dead or close to it. The last release was in Dec 2002 and there's only blips of activity on their sourceforge tracker so it may be difficult to have changes implemented.

Matt

Comment 15 Kevin Fenzi 2009-12-16 05:35:03 UTC
Yes. See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries#When_a_Bundled_Library_is_Discovered_Post-Review

Basically: file a bug on it, and make it block the blocker used to track these issues.

Comment 16 Matt Chan 2009-12-16 05:49:32 UTC
Another bit of fun while exploring tkHTML3 this time:

Everything is statically linked in, from 2006 or so. I'm not sure what it would take to refactor to use dynamic libs, never tried before and I don't know if the lib versions from 2006 are still around.

Upstream appears to be dead as well:
http://groups.google.com/group/tkhtml3/browse_thread/thread/3eeb094b7b460e3a

As before, any thoughts?

Matt

Comment 17 Toshio Ernie Kuratomi 2009-12-16 15:42:51 UTC
When an upstream is dead like you're saying tkImg and tkHTML3 are, the problem of bundled and static libraries is exacerbated.  In those cases, instead of having to wait for multiple upstreams to discover problems, make fixes, announce them, and then have the next upstream in the chain realise the problem affects their bundled libraries, make fixes, and release updated tarballs, we have upstreams whose source will never change even though there's known security vulnerabilities.  This makes it even more imperative that the packager fixes these problems as soon as possible as the packager is the new upstream for the package and if they package with these problems then the maintenance burden for fixing those types of security problems falls entirely on them.

Comment 18 Christopher Sean Morrison 2009-12-16 20:48:46 UTC
It's worth noting a few updates since this recent set of updates about tkImg and tkHTML3.  First off, some clarifications.  The tkImg package only bundles those external dependencies for download convenience and can be disabled.  In fact, our bundling of tkImg itself in BRL-CAD was a simple subset of just the PNG Tcl bindings (without libpng, libz, or any other lib).  That said .. we're already in the process of replacing tkImg with tkPNG since it's even more simple and is closer to the minimal functionality that we need.  To top it off, we found existing RPMs for tkImg around the same time.. :)

As for tkHTML3 and the assertion that things were being statically linked in, that was a mistake.  The tkHTML3 sources don't even have any external dependencies, much less linking in anything static.  There was some confusion inferred from a misleading statement on the website about a related code.

So the basic summary, it's mostly all moot.  We'll have to get tkPNG packaged, but that should be very easy.

Comment 19 Toshio Ernie Kuratomi 2009-12-16 22:56:37 UTC
> The tkImg package only bundles
those external dependencies for download convenience and can be disabled.

Excellent.  As long as those are disabled in the Fedora build it's perfectly acceptable :-)

The rest of your update sounds very encouraging as well.

Comment 20 Matt Chan 2009-12-24 05:06:00 UTC
A quick update on our progress so far:

The TNT (and JAMA) libraries have been abstracted out and packaged. The review requests are at 549980 and 550234. If someone has a second, could they review them quickly please? They are just a bunch of headers and have less than 25 files each package. It shouldn't take more than 30 mins for each.

And on the tkhtml3 front, the former upstream dev has confirmed directly that the project is dead.

The brlcad team have made provisions to take over the upstream for the STEP and Utah projects. The transition to tkPng will be made in the next release, and tkImg will be dropped as a requirement. Tkhtml3 and OpenNURBS are the remaining issues which have not been resolved yet.

Matt

Comment 21 Peter Lemenkov 2009-12-24 19:32:14 UTC
Unblocking FE-NEEDSPONSOR since I just sponsored Matt.

Comment 22 Matt Chan 2010-04-20 22:37:51 UTC
A quick status update on our progress since the last comment:

- TkHtml3 has been taken over officially. The BRLCAD team is working towards creating an updated release that we can use in our package and also setting up project infrastructure.
- Utah Raster Toolkit has been taken over as well. They're in the process of deciding on a new name for the project to establish a new home for it.
- TNT and JAMA have been reviewed and are ready for submission into the repos.

Our remaining issues preventing packaging are:
- Project infrastructure for NIST Step Class Libraries, TkHtml3, Utah Raster Toolkit
- releases for above mentioned projects
- refactor OpenNURBS code to be compatible with upstream

Matt

Comment 23 Jason Tibbitts 2010-11-02 02:42:09 UTC
Since it seems that this isn't yet ready for review, I'm going to mark it as such.  If it does become ready for review, please clear the Whiteboard field above.

Comment 24 cliffyapp 2012-11-27 15:51:30 UTC
Just thought I'd post some updated info in case anyone wants to start working on this again:

The situation with Utah Raster Toolkit and TkHtml3 remains largely unchanged - in both cases the primary need is to set up separate project infrastructure.  That's not currently high priority for us, but it is on the TODO list.

TNT/JAMA is still currently needed, but we are looking to switch to using the Eigen C++ headers now that they've become MPL2+LGPLv2+ licensed - once we complete that process, the TNT/JAMA issue will go away.  We will use Eigen 3.1.2 or greater - there's already a Fedora Eigen3 package from the looks of it, although it's currently at 3.0.6: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/eigen3

The openNURBS issues remain unchanged - we are trying to boil down our code changes into either things that can live in our own libraries, or patches upstream will accept.

The NIST Step Class Libraries are the most interesting update - there is now a separate open source project working on this code called STEPcode:  http://stepcode.org.  BRL-CAD is working with this project to merge our changes into their upstream - this is a large job (http://stepcode.org/mw/index.php/BRL-CAD_patches) but there is active interest on both sides.  Once the merge is complete and STEPcode makes a release with BRL-CAD's changes, we will be able to build against STEPcode as a proper external dependency.

For anyone wanting to make progress towards BRL-CAD being a viable Fedora RPM candidate, I'd suggest starting by contacting the STEPcode list and helping with the merge process and/or creating a Fedora STEPcode RPM.

Comment 25 Christopher Meng 2013-11-28 11:32:05 UTC
Fine.

I will try to make an RPM of stepcode.

Comment 26 James Hogarth 2015-12-04 01:12:09 UTC
There has been no comments on this ticket for quite some time. As per the policy for stalled reviews please respond within a week or this will be closed.

Matt are you intending to pick this up again or is this no longer in your radar?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Policy_for_stalled_package_reviews

Comment 27 Matt Chan 2015-12-04 03:35:11 UTC
I don't have time to work with this package unfortunately.

I'm actually packaging a few other projects now. This time a few of my colleagues and I are the authors so hopefully it will go smoother.

Sorry. Can someone pick this up for me if they're interested?

Comment 28 James Hogarth 2015-12-04 03:38:01 UTC
(In reply to Matt Chan from comment #27)
> I don't have time to work with this package unfortunately.
> 
> I'm actually packaging a few other projects now. This time a few of my
> colleagues and I are the authors so hopefully it will go smoother.
> 
> Sorry. Can someone pick this up for me if they're interested?

Thanks for responding so quickly.

In that case I'll close this as a dead review for now to clean up the queue a bit and so that others can see the process isn't continuing and they can open a fresh review ticket if they desire.

Comment 29 Germano Massullo 2016-08-13 13:55:12 UTC
For your info, I started interesting in making a spec file for brlcad and all libraries that need to be unbundled.
If anybody wants to cooperate, feel free to send me an e-mail.
Have a nice day


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