Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: "Aaron M. Ucko" <u...@debian.org>
* Package name : ncbi-entrez-direct Version : 3.60 Upstream Author : Jonathan Kans <k...@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov> * URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK179288 * License : Public Domain Programming Lang: Perl, Go, Bourne shell Description : NCBI Entrez utilities on the command line Entrez Direct (EDirect) is an advanced method for accessing NCBI's set of interconnected databases (publication, sequence, structure, gene, variation, expression, etc.) from a terminal window or script. Functions take search terms from command-line arguments. Individual operations are combined to build multi-step queries. Record retrieval and formatting normally complete the process. EDirect also provides an argument-driven function that simplifies the extraction of data from document summaries or other results that are returned in structured XML format. This can eliminate the need for writing custom software to answer ad hoc questions. Queries can move seamlessly between EDirect commands and UNIX utilities or scripts to perform actions that cannot be accomplished entirely within Entrez. With all due respect to the Go packaging team, I feel that maintaining EDirect within Debian Med or perhaps Debian Science would be more appropriate, as it falls outside the mainstream Go ecosystem. Yes, one individual tool happens to be written in Go, but EDirect otherwise consists of a mixture of Perl and shell scripts, and the Go tool has no dependencies beyond the standard library. Also, I am inclined to build the tool in question with gccgo rather than golang-go, which is available for fewer architectures and provides no obvious way to obtain dynamic linkage against system libraries, for which Policy 10.1 calls. I'm debating whether to go fully dynamic (yielding, on amd64, a 228K executable depending on a 34M library with hardly any other reverse dependencies) or to link libgo statically (yielding a 3.2M executable with no exotic dependencies). I suppose the fully dynamic approach is better practice, but would appreciate feedback on this point. -- Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC (amu at alum.mit.edu, ucko at debian.org) http://www.mit.edu/~amu/ | http://stuff.mit.edu/cgi/finger/?a...@monk.mit.edu
