On Thu 23 Apr, 22:46 +0200, Christian Kastner <c...@debian.org> wrote:
Upstream is actually creating a libsvm namespace. When installing
libsvm using pip, the package layout is the following:
libsvm
├── __init__.py
├── commonutil.py
├── svm.py
└── svmutil.py
While that would solve the namespace problem, it appears to me that the
PyPI package is not maintained by upstream, but by a third party. In
support of that suspicion is the fact that upstream's documentation
(also shipped in our Python package as README) does not use this namespace.
So our choices seem to be:
(1) upstream changes the namespace to libsvm
(2) we stick with commonutil
(3) we rename commonutil
(4) we patch svmutil by merging in commonutil (which itself is brief)
(1) would be the cleanest solution, but would have to be coordinated
with upstream, which might take a while, and theoretically could be met
with rejection.
(2) is out of the question for me. (3) is simple but confusing.
(4) is probably the simplest solution, and is what happens in practice
anyway. If one checks svmutil (the only consumer of commonutil), it
imports everything of commonutil into its own namespace.
I'll give this some more thought, but the solution will probably be
implement (4), and ping upstream about (1) for some future release.
Well, even if (4) seems the most pragmatic approach, I think there are still
some problems with it. In particular, software depending on libsvm3 would have
to support the Debian-specific way of importing the library, along with the PyPI
version. Assume your library/software is using libsvm. If libsvm has been
installed with the Debian package, then the correct import is:
import svmutil
if libsvm has been installed with pip, then the correct import is:
import libsvm.svmutil as svmutil
I encountered this problem while updating the python3-mdp package, so the use
case is pretty concrete. So maybe, before implementing (4), it would be nice to
ask upstream their opinion about this mess (option (1))?
In general I think that the more consistency the better, so in case of doubts
I would say that Debian should follow PyPI, or otherwise Debian or the end user
would have to patch any script/library using libsvm if they want it to be
portable…
Best regards,
Tiziano
