Re: [PATCH] gnu: add sparta-dsmc

[Leo Famulari]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 01:47:18AM -0500, Lukas Gradl wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 08:21:35PM +0300, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 12:04:56PM -0500, Lukas Gradl wrote:
> > > On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 04:26:59AM -0400, Leo Famulari wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Apr 04, 2016 at 03:55:51PM -0500, Lukas Gradl wrote:
> > > > > Hello Guix!
> > > > > 
> > > > > Attached is a patch to add the SPARTA Direct Simulation Monte Carlo
> > > > > Software.
> > > > > 
> > > > > There maybe is a problem with the source URL: The URL always points to
> > > > > the latest version of the source tar ball which is constantly updated
> > > > > and immediately released by upstream.  This means that the hash of the
> > > > > source tar ball available at this URL changes several times a month.  
> > > > > Is
> > > > > this acceptable or does anyone have an idea how this should be 
> > > > > handled?
> > > > 
> > > > I assume you've looked for a more stable URL. Are there other distros
> > > > that have solved this problem? Can you contact the SPARTA developers and
> > > > ask if there is a solution?
> > > 
> > > AFAIK this software is not packaged in any other distro.  I am already
> > > in contact with the author of SPARTA, he provided the URL that I used in
> > > the patch.  I explained the problem to him and I am waiting for his
> > > response.
> > > 
> > > Thank you!
> > 
> > Not just for this package but potentially for others, could we stick a
> > copy on archive.org with a date-stamp or something?
> 
> 
> Sorry for the long delay!
> 
> My message to upstream is still unanswered, so I went ahead and uploaded
> the tar ball to archive.org.  Attached is an updated patch.

Do we at least know why the tarball keeps changing? For example, is it a
new release? Have you inspected the differences from one to the next?

If the upstream author could say, "use this tarball with hash xxx[...]",
we could confidently distribute software from the author to our users.

Thanks for you work on this so far!