Last week, a new release of Code_Aster entered Debian unstable. Code_Aster is a finite element solver for partial differential equations in mechanics, mainly developed by EDF R&D (Électricité de France). It is arguably one of the most feature complete free software available in this domain.
Aster has been in Debian since 2012 thanks to the work of debian-science team. Yet it has always been somehow a problematic package with a couple of persistent Release Critical (RC) bugs (FTBFS, instalability issues) and actually never entered a stable release of Debian.
Logilab has committed to improving Code_Aster for a long time in various areas, notably through the LibAster friendly fork, which aims at turning the monolithic Aster into a library, usable from Python.
Recently, the EDF R&D team in charge of the development of Code_Aster took several major decisions, including:
- the move to Bitbucket forge as a sign of community opening (following the path opened by LibAster that imported the code of Code_Aster into a Mercurial repository) and,
- the change of build system from a custom makefile-style architecture to a fine-grained Waf system (taken from that of LibAster).
The latter obviously led to significant changes on the Debian packaging side, most of which going into a sane direction: the debian/rules file slimed down from 239 lines to 51 and a bunch of tricky install-step manipulations were dropped leading to something much simpler and closer to upstream (see #731211 for details). From upstream perspective, this re-packaging effort based on the new build-system may be the opportunity to update the installation scheme (in particular by declaring the Python library as private).
Clearly, there's still room for improvements on both side (like building with the new metis library, shipping several versions of Aster stable/testing, MPI/serial). All in all, this is good for both Debian users and upstream developers. At Logilab, we hope that this effort will consolidate our collaboration with EDF R&D.