wiki:PackageNotes

Version 2 (modified by jdreed, 9 years ago) (diff)

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Notes About Specific Packages

debathena-thirdparty

Location in the source tree: debathena/debathena-thirdparty

The purpose of this package is to provide "third party software". Historically, "third party software" was software installed in lockers, and not in the release. This includes commercial software like MATLAB, but also included a lot of Free Software, because back in the day, the base system didn't include a lot of the packages that are commonplace in Linux distributions. So the name is now a historical accident, but the purpose of this package is to depend on other packages in Ubuntu, to ensure they're installed on debathena-cluster machines and the dialups.

Because the list of packages changes across Ubuntu releases, it's difficult to make this a one-size-fits-all package. So it generates its list of dependencies at build time. We specify what packages we want, and we have per-distribution override lists. Internally, it uses the chdist program to determine what packages are available for what distributions. If we depend on a package, and that package is not available, the build will fail.

See BUILDING in the package's directory in the source tree for a detailed explanation of the syntax of the lists files. But basically, updating this package consists of making a change either to lists/common (to pull something in on all distros) or lists/distro-codename-goes-here to pull something in on specific distros.