Hi all, On 27/02/25 8:07 pm, Roland Mas wrote: > As part of our work on Scibian, a Debian derivative focused on > scientific computing at EDF, we're in need of working packages for > apptainer. We're ready to put up with the work needed, or at least give > it our best shot. > > We believe it makes sense to maintain them in Debian first, so in order > not to duplicate work or step on anyone's toes, I'm sending this email > to a wide audience; I suggest restricting your replies to the debian-go > list, which we feel is the most appropriate for discussion. > > singularity and apptainer have a long and complex history, with many > packaging attempts by various persons. Our first task will be to get an > idea of who did what, where the code lives, and probably pick a starting > point from there.
Since you said you'd like to figure out this part first, please consider to read-up this thread on -devel ML[1]. It has responses from the upstream author of singularity as well, which can help you with some of the pointers on how maintaining it in Debian will look like, and the caveats to keep in mind. Please also note that for singularity-container has been out of testing not because it was in a bad shape always, but due to challenges in maintaining it in stable release please see #1029669 -- I have been delivering it via fasttrack.debian.net since. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/01/msg00078.html > Also, if you have words of wisdom or warnings or > ideas, ther by all means do speak up. The task is big and indimidating, > and any help will be most welcome. No words of wisdom, as such, but a question: Since singularity is very close to apptainer, do you think your energy could be better spent in maintaining singularity-container instead and trying to release that to stable instead of packaging apptainer? OTOH, If we are going ahead with apptainer anyway, maybe it makes sense to -rm singularity? On 27/02/25 9:03 pm, Andrius Merkys wrote: > Hello, > > On 2025-02-27 16:37, Roland Mas wrote: >> As part of our work on Scibian, a Debian derivative focused on >> scientific computing at EDF, we're in need of working packages for >> apptainer. We're ready to put up with the work needed, or at least give >> it our best shot. > > I welcome your initiative. I am using apptainer a lot and would happily > switch away from locally-built .deb for it. Is there any particular feature that you use in apptainer that's not present in singularity? To be honest with you, since singularity-container has mostly always been a lot of effort, esp the backporting to stable part, I'd always try to make it convenient to use it. PS: A good reminder for me to fix a pending RC bug there :) Best, Nilesh
