XPost: linux.debian.devel

Package: wnpp
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: singularity-container@packages.debian.org, debian-devel@lists.debian.org, orv@debian.org, mehdi@dogguy.org
Control: affects -1 + src:singularity-container

Assistance required with maintaining the singularity-container package.

I am not the uploader/maintainer of this package, however I am the only
one who has been taking care of it via team uploads for more than 2 years
and all other uploaders are MIA. Few of them asked me to remove myself from uploaders field, which I have done. However, I don't consider the package well-maintained w/o me doing the work.
It is also stalled from migrating to stable because maintaining it there requires backporting and testing CVE fixes and I don't have the bandwidth
to do that work, which is the reason for #1029669.

With my available time, it is unlikely that I will be maintaining it timely
or at all.

Any help for maintaining it would be great.

The package description is:
Mobility of Compute encapsulates the development to compute model
where developers can work in an environment of their choosing and
creation and when the developer needs additional compute resources,
this environment can easily be copied and executed on other platforms.
Additionally as the primary use case for Singularity is targeted
towards computational portability, many of the barriers to entry of
other container solutions do not apply to Singularity making it an
ideal solution for users (both computational and non-computational)
and HPC centers.

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On Mon, Apr 08, 2024 at 08:59:26AM +0300, Andrius Merkys wrote:

On 2024-04-07 15:28, Nilesh Patra wrote:

Assistance required with maintaining the singularity-container package.

I am not offering help with singularity-container, but do you by any chance know why apptainer is not packaged for Debian? I cannot find a wnpp bug.

I am lazy to find references right now, but you should be able to find it in debian-hpc and debian-devel archives. If I don't miss anything this was the sequence of events:

1) While updating singularity-container, Andreas created a repo for apptainer on
salsa.
2) The goal at that time was to get a mobility compute (either apptainer or singularity) up and running
3) singularity and apptainer codebases are in sync so as per my understanding there's no real point in having *both* - here's a brief discussion about it[1]

My opinion: It does not make a lot of sense to package apptainer as well. Although the latter is "community" maintained, the codebases for sylabs/singularity and apptainer are in close sync at most times which also means they keep inheriting CVEs from each other too.

As a result one may not be able to maintain apptainer well in stable release either unless they have:
a) Good/Great go programming skills
b) ability to deal with CVEs and backports

I'd like to just link to a similar discussion thread about the same rather than repeating the points[2] and here's what upstream says[3].

What do you think?

[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-hpc/2022/08/msg00021.html
[2]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/01/msg00078.html
[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/01/msg00080.html

Best,
Nilesh

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