[needs-packaging] Add Visual Understanding Environment to main repositories

[Iván Pérez]

I would like this program (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tuftsvue/) to be added one of the main repositories.
It's very simple, it should only take a few minutes to create the deb for it, it's all in one .jar file. Notice that the
license is not GPL, but Educational Community 2. I've been using the program for a few weeks now and it works
reasonably well.

[Iván Pérez (ivan.perez-keera.es)]

I've placed a .deb for it at http://salomon.ls.fi.upm.es/vue-2.2.8.deb

Feel free to try it, decompress it, modify it, etc. Note that the .jar that the VUE project distributes includes part of the dependencies, which I believe is hardly admissible according to Ubuntu's standards. Note also that there are some mistakes in the .deb file, which can be easily found using lintian.

[Anthony Noto (angusthefuzz)]

Thank you for suggesting this package for Ubuntu. This package does not currently exist within Ubuntu or Debian, therefore I am marking this bug confirmed.

[Iván Pérez (ivan.perez-keera.es)]

I started a thread in VUE's forums regarding this matter:

https://vue-forums.uit.tufts.edu/posts/list/299.page

There are links there to a .jar without the dependencies and comments
about compilation of this .jar file.

[Iván Pérez (ivan.perez-keera.es)]

I was recently notified that the link to the .deb file is broken.

As I recall it, the main problem to create this deb is the huge amount of libraries vue is distributed with.
Most of them are not available in Ubuntu. This means that either we create one package
for each library, which is a lot of work, or we distribute them as part of the package for vue, which
is ugly and, most likely, against all distribution standards.

I guess that, given the support for ppa's in the upcoming Karmic release, a ppa for vue
would be the most appropriate approach. However, that would mean that we would need
to build everything from source (which is even more work).

I've recently switched to a different software (xmind, suits the purpose I was using vue for)
and lost track of the status of vue. I remain interested, but I would appreciate
it if somebody else could actively help me create these packages.

[Iván Pérez (ivan.perez-keera.es)]

Bump.

[Jezza (balingupjer)]

bump - is this that hard?
i use Vue, but can't code etc...

[Jezza (balingupjer)]

desktop file here - https://vue-forums.uit.tufts.edu/posts/list/848.page

icon here - https://vue-forums.uit.tufts.edu/posts/list/720.page

[Iván Pérez (ivan.perez-keera.es)]

It really wouldn't seem very hard. I stopped using vue more than two years ago but, as I remember it, all that was necessary was to create a deb that didn't carry any jars other than vue's. If I remember correctly, the policy to include a package in the repos requires that you don't package the program with auxiliary libraries. Rather, you are expected to place them in seperate packages so that other programs that use any of those libraries can depend on the packages that provides each one of them. This might imply that many other packages have to be included in the repos so that vue can itself be included (vue has lots of dependencies).

Also, I don't know if somebody has checked whether those libraries can be linked together. Some may have conflicting licences and, if that were the case, Ubuntu would not allow the package to be uploded to the official repos.

Unless someone does want to work on this, I think it would be enough is somebody could build the deb once (with auxiliary libraries) and make it available for everyone else (post it on a website). It would take less than 1 hour for anybody who's created a deb before (ideally it would be somebody who uses this).