Hi, I'm announcing the formation of the Debian protobuf packaging team that will be responsible for packaging the src:protobuf package. (And maybe closely related packages like src:grpc, if the maintainers are interested.)
Iustin Pop has maintained src:protobuf in the past, and I've maintained it through the 2.5.x and 2.6.x upstream releases, but I don't have much time to devote to it in the near future, so after receiving mail from several developers interested in helping package the upcoming 3.x release I'm turning it over to a team. Anyone interested in helping to package the upcoming upstream 3.x releases is welcome to join the Alioth group and mailing list: https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-protobuf/ https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-protobuf-devel The upcoming 3.x release has gotten more complicated to package, mostly through the addition of new language bindings. It also introduces a new backwards-incompatible language syntax "proto3", while still supporting the deprecated "proto2" syntax. Upstream says the following about proto3 vs proto2: We recommend that new Protocol Buffers users use proto3. However, we do not generally recommend that existing users migrate from proto2 from proto3 due to API incompatibility, and we will continue to support proto2 for a long time. Upstream doesn't specify exactly how long proto2 will be supported, but if proto2 language support is removed from a future protobuf version, it may cause problems for some of the packages listed below. The TODO list is: - Ack the src:protobuf NMUs (2.6.1-1.1, -1.2, -1.3) by committing them to the repo. - Figure out what to do about the semi-embedded gmock/gtest build dependency. Related upstream issues: https://github.com/google/protobuf/issues/302 https://github.com/google/protobuf/issues/808 - Figure out how to package the new language bindings in protobuf 3. protobuf has a number of reverse dependencies in the archive, including: anfo bitcoin-qt clementine cubemap emacs-mozc-bin fcitx-mozc gazebo5 gazebo5-plugin-base ibus-mozc libanfo0 libgazebo5 libignition-transport0 libola1 libphonenumber6 libshogun16 litecoin-qt mahimahi monav-preprocessor mosh mozc-server mozc-utils-gui mumble mumble-server ola osrm ostinato php5-pinba pink-pony pokerth pokerth-server protobuf-c-compiler python-imposm python-imposm-parser python-protobuf shogun-cmdline-static uim-mozc zbackup (This is just a list of rdeps on libprotobuf9 or libprotobuf9v5, IIRC there are some source packages that have build-deps on protobuf that don't appear as binary deps.) protobuf is implemented in C++ and has frequent ABI bumps. The transitions tend to be fairly involved, see the bug logs for the last two transitions for details: https://bugs.debian.org/726165 https://bugs.debian.org/760343 There are some interesting projects that depend on Protocol Buffers, such as Canonical's Mir and Google's gRPC. The OpenStreetMap project also has a binary "PBF" format that uses protobufs. (IIRC, protobufs are also used in some of Canonical's web services.) If you are involved in packaging those projects, you might want to look into helping out with packaging src:protobuf. Thanks! -- Robert Edmonds edmo...@debian.org