new debian version

[mweyland]

Hi!

I'm working on new debian packages for celestia since the ones included are rather old and there are lots of bugs and solved wishlist items in the BTS.

The package is almost finished and I hope it will be uploaded within the next few days. I've read somewhere in the forum that there are no developers using debian, so I'd welcome some collaboration between the developers and the debian maintainer. For another package, I forward digests of meaningful bugreports to upstream, as well as selfmade and submitted patches. Upstream decides whether those patches will be applied or not, that's ok for me. So I'm asking whether celestia's developers are interested in such a team play.

As for now, this is an abstract of the debian changelog containing the relevant things:

* Fixed broken lua includes in src/celestia/celx.(cpp|h)
I have no idea about windows/other distributions, but
In debian, there is no liblua, but liblua40 and 50, so I
corrected the linking in configure and configure.in.
Furthermore, the includes pointed to "lua.h", but there
is no such header in the tarball, so I corrected that one too.

* Applied patch to compile with gcc-3.4 (closes: #270008)
Andreas Jochens submitted a patch which enables compilation
with gcc-3.4.

And I have some requests and questions:

- It would be very nice if you could use a newer version of autoconf. Such an old version will (or maybe even already does) break on some architechtures, sooner or later.

- Why is there a CVS directory included in the tarball? Maybe this is lack of understanding on my part, but AFAIK CVS shouldn't be included in release tarballs.

- What do you think about bug 174456?

That's it for the present, thank you very much for developing such a nice piece of software!

best regards
Mathias Weyland[/i]

[selden]

I'm not a Celestia developer, but...

There was a somewhat acrimonius discussion with some, umm, misguided Debian big\\\\ enthusiasts about Celestia's copyright status a year or so ago. You might search the Forum for it. The current version of Celestia tries to include appropriate copyright statements and attributions.

It isn't clear from what you wrote if you used the tarball from SourceForge or some other version. If you haven't already, you might want to access the Celestia CVS archive on SourceForge.

[t00fri]

- What do you think about bug 174456?

All standard astronomical data including HIPPARCOS are offered for download to everyone without /apparent/ Copyright restrictions via a global scientific server network.

http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/
http://cadcwww.dao.nrc.ca/
http://archive.eso.org/eso/eso_archive_overview.html

...
I.e. there is certainly no HIPPARCOS CD required.

At least in my own laboratory, we are forced to publish all aquired data in the public domain, like is general practice in the scientific world, globally...

And last not least, we don't have the man-power really to exhaust our little available spare time with sophisticated juristical Copyright issues, where we are not experts anyhow. It would be a great help if major distributors (who partly /make money/ with excellent OpenSource products like Celestia) could contribute their share through their expert advice in this delicate sector.

One of the developers (Pat Suwalski), who wrote the port to gtk2 and gnome is probably using and certainly supporting Debian. Celestia is already part of most major Linux distributions worldwide. The citations of data-sources used in the most recent official Celestia distribution have been examined and generally been considered adequate by them.

Certainly, the number of Linux distributors has grown /much/ faster recently than the number of Celestia developers

The inherent sophisticated and partly untransparent 'patch- and integration strategies' often prevent effectively an easy interchange of software among different distributions.
While this helps to make many non-expert users stay always with the same distribution , it makes it simply impossible for us to offer (binary) versions of Celestia for all existing Linux varieties.

Bye Fridger

[jromer]

Hello,

I'm not having success installing Celestia on Kubuntu 5.04 i386 system running KDE.

I tried apt-get celestia and can't get it to work. (I'm new to debian...I'm using Kubuntu 5.04 with KDE) There seem to be two files in question: celestia-common_1.3.2-1_all.deb and celestia_1.3.2-1_i386.deb.

I downloaded these and created a local repository.

The first one installs OK but the second one shows the following errors...

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
celestia: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-21) but 2.3.2.ds1-20ubuntu13 is to be installed
Depends: libfontconfig1 (>= 2.3.0) but 2.2.3-4ubuntu7 is to be installed
Depends: libidn11 (>= 0.5.13) but 0.5.2-3 is to be installed
Depends: libqt3c102-mt (>= 3:3.3.4) but 3:3.3.3-7ubuntu3 is to be installed
E: Broken packages

Was wondering if I'm using the correct files and if I'm doing something obviously wrong to someone with some experience with Kubuntu/Debian/Linux/Celestia.

Any help would certainly be appreciated. Thanks.

[selden]

Unfortunately, there are no Kubuntu/Debian experts who here regularly. Superficially, however, it looks like whoever (maybe mweyland, as above?) built Celestia for Debian used newer libraries than are installed on your system. You might try contacting whoever that was if you can't upgrade your system appropriately.

Alternatively, you can try building Celestia from scratch yourself. Source code is available on SourcForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia

[alphap1us]

Hi,
You are getting the problem becuase of special branding by the ubuntu maintainers. This has happened to me with other packages. Perhaps if you installed the package versions it requires through the universe or multiverse components, it would resolve this problem. (Look for more info at the Ubuntu site if you don't know how to do this.

Cheers,
Joe

[jromer]

Yes, if I understand, I did do this (via apt-get) but the Universal links only have version 1.3.0 available (which does work). I did get the above 1.3.2 pkg to actually install although I'm not exactly sure how, but when I'd run it it would blank out my screen and crash the system. I had the NVidia drivers installed properly. Curiously, it did run once...but after I shut it down and restarted it I was never able to get it to run again...it would just crash my system as before.

Well I've spent enough time on that experiment...I'll just go back to Mandrake for now.

Thanks for the input.

[jromer]

I did get the Debian pkg from mweyland to install on my Kubuntu 5.04 system. I apparently was incorrectly installing the missing dependencies. Now everything is working great. Thanks to you mweyland!!