NOTE: this blog post is based on my "Clojure CLI Tools in Debian" GSoC 2021 project Partial Evaluation Report.

Hi, everybody!

For those who don't know me, my name is Leandro Doctors (allentiak on IRC), and I'm the Debian Clojure Team's GSoC 2021 intern. My mentor is Louis-Philippe Véronneau[*] (pollo on IRC). My co-mentor is Utkarsh Gupta (utkarsh2102 on IRC). My 'no-mentor' :) is Elana Hashman (ehashman on IRC).

In this message, I will summarize what I've been up to during the Coding I period (June 7th - July 16th).

TL;DR: my updated data-xml-clojure package was accepted[1] in experimental on Wednesday night :-)

[1] https://tracker.debian.org/news/1244465/accepted-data-xml-clojure-020alpha6-1-source-into-experimental/

Now, let's tell the full story.

During the first days of the "Coding I" phase, I did some research on the clj dependencies. And after the precious feedback from Louis-Philippe, Elana, Utkarsh, and Alex Miller (the upstream developer of clj, among many other libraries), I came up with the following packaging strategy.

1. update org.clojure:data.xml (data-xml-clojure) to 0.2.0-beta6.
2. package org.clojure:tools.gitlibs (tools-gitlibs-clojure).
3. consider updating libjsch-agent-proxy-java, jgit, libtools-cli-clojure (all of them already in Debian).
4. consider packaging com.cognitec.aws:* packages.

According to my original proposal, I should have completed all four tasks during Coding I. Looking back, the main lesson from these past weeks is a known classic: my timeline was too optimistic: I definitely underestimated the difficulty of the packaging process. Out of the four tasks, I only finished the first one.

There were many challenges I had to overcome in order to update the library from version 0.0.8 to 0.2.0-alpha6:

This what I did:

First, I patched the source code so:

• • we avoid needlessly packaging data-codec-clojure (not currently in Debian).
• • we can ignore Clojure-Script-related dependencies.

Then, I completely overhauled the packaging code (this is, what goes inside debian/).

• • added support for automatically tracking newer releases.
• • the package now builds with Leiningen, instead of plain Java.
• • it now actually supports autopkgtest (the existing test was trivial).

All this improved the quality of the package.

I also improved the Clojure Packaging Tutorial[2] to make the process easier to follow.

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Clojure/PackagingTutorial

Looking back, it is almost as if I had started packaging the library from scratch...

But, more that what I produced, I think the most important part of all this is what I learned during these weeks.

As it was the first time I ever packaged anything in Debian, I had to learn the basics, bump by bump. (And, oh my, I surely did bump quite a few times!)

• • Basic packaging workflow.
• • Setup sbuild[3] to make it work with gbp[4] (when I had rebuilt bidi-clojure from scratch, I had used plain sbuild.)
• • Learn how to patch upstream files with quilt[5] (actually, via the dquilt frontend). This was the first really difficult task to do, since it took me quite some time to grasp it. Looking back, I think I was simply scared of breaking something :)
• • Understanding debian/ files.
• • Understanding debian/tests (autopkgtest) files. This was particularly difficult, since the doc wasn't clear about it. So I then improved the Clojure Packaging Tutorial[2] to make the process easier to follow.

[2] https://wiki.debian.org/Clojure/PackagingTutorial

[3] https://wiki.debian.org/sbuild

[4] https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/git-buildpackage/gbp.1.en.html

[5] https://wiki.debian.org/UsingQuilt

Definitely, all this was worth it. After all, my updated data-xml-clojure package was accepted[1] in experimental on Wednesday :-)

[1] https://tracker.debian.org/news/1244465/accepted-data-xml-clojure-020alpha6-1-source-into-experimental/

Now that I've learned the basics of packaging bumped enough to get my package accepted, I'm hopeful I can ramp up and catch up with (at least most of) my original schedule during Coding II.

tools-gitlibs-clojure, you're next :-)

Thank you very much Louis-Philippe, Elana, and Utkarsh (plus a special mention to Alex) for your precious support during the last few weeks!