kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Carsten,

On 1/2/2018 10:12 AM, Carsten Schoenert wrote:
> Hello Wayne,
> 
> Am 02.01.2018 um 15:33 schrieb Wayne Stambaugh:
>> Would one of our Debian developers please prod the Debian ngspice
>> package[1] maintainer(s) to enable building ngspice with a shared
>> library and a -dev package.  A bug report[2] for this was filed almost a
>> 1 1/2 years ago (aug 2016) and it still has not be resolved.  Carsten
>> was kind enough to even provide patches to resolve the issue.
>> Unfortunately, they were ignored and no long apply cleanly.  It appears
>> that the package build files have be updated and none of Carsten's
>> patches were accepted.  I checked the latest version of Ubuntu and their
>> ngspice package isn't build with a shared library.  I'm guessing all of
>> the Debian derivatives are the same in this respect.  It would be a
>> shame to not be able to provide spice support to users of Debian it's
>> derivatives.  I would really appreciate it if someone would be kind
>> enough to provide a patch against the current Debian source package so
>> myself and other developers could build and test KiCad with spice
>> enabled on Debian.
> 
> the recently uploaded new version of ngspice into Debian unstable is
> still non-free. By this I can't use it for building KiCad in Debian main.
> 
> I started over a half year ago to evaluate the options for bringing
> ngspice into main and have also asked the current maintainer of ngspice
> about my plans.
> 
> The good news is, I can mostly build all parts of ngspice for main which
> are needed for the KiCad build, unless this would be "only" the
> libngspice0.so itself and the one header file ngspice/sharedspice.h.
> 
> But from a Debian POV this is a new source package which needs to go
> through NEW and also need to respect the existing package from non-free
> to not collide with users systems which already use this package. Thus I
> need to also take care of this which is also time consuming. Most of the
> packaging is done. But I need to review the existing tree more in deep
> so a upload to NEW wouldn't be rejected due still existing license
> issues or other Debian compliance issues. Some more review is really
> appreciated.
> The controlling inside the (new) packages to give people a migration
> path from the old ngspice package needs to be designed and integrated.
> Which is mostly a decision of package names which users will be given.
> The old ngspice packages should be ideally called *-nonfree so a
> transition would be mostly easier. But it's not that simple as it looks
> like from a first view and some interaction with the people from the
> archive will also be needed.
> 
> My current Debian WIP tree can be found on my GitHub site [1]. Some more
> emails are written to the Debian Electronics team [2].
> If someone can do some testing of the libngspice0-dev package against
> the current development of KiCad I'd like to hear if still something
> isn't working. Unfortunately ngspice isn't creating a pkg-config file so
> right now there isn't one. Note also the installation path for the
> header files has also changed against version 26 but so far the cmake
> snippet should find it in the default path for header files
> /usr/inlcude. I plan to work later on a pkg-config file and bring this
> upstream.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/tijuca/ngspice-dfsg
> [2]
> https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-electronics-devel/2017-September/004472.html
> 
> https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-electronics-devel/2017-December/004624.html
> 

Thank you for the update.  I did not realize all of this was going on in
order to get a new ngspice package into Debian.  I appreciate your
efforts.  I will try to build this package, install it on my system, and
build and test kicad against it overt the weekend if I have time.

Cheers,

Wayne