Main Inclusion Report for protbuf

Requirements

1. Availability: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/protobuf; all, i386, amd64

2. Rationale:

   • Google protocol buffers is a popular library for creating custom binary message formats and wire protocols. It is a key depependency of the soon-to-be released Online Services products, but it also being adopted by other projects such as Drizzle (the mysql fork). The main alternative to Google Protocol Buffers is thrift, from facebook. I expect both libraries to become widely used.

3. Security:

   • CVE entries: No CVE reports found.

   • Secunia history: No reports found.

   • Any binaries running as root or suid/sgid? None. Any daemons ? None.
   • Network activity: intended for encoding/decoding wire formats, and includes a compiler to generate various language bindings to do the encoding.
   • Does it directly (not through a library) process binary (video, audio, etc) or structured (PDF, etc) data ? : Yes, it's all about encoding/decoding binary messages.
   • Any source code review performed ? (The approver will do a quick and shallow check.) No.

4. Quality assurance:

   • In what situations does the package not work out of the box without configuration ? None.
   • Does the package ask any debconf questions higher than priority 'medium' ? No.

   • Debian bugs: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=503807

   • Maintenance in Debian is calm

   • http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/ is vigorous

   • http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/issues/list: All current issues Medium or lower.

   • Hardware: N/A
   • Is there a test suite in the upstream source or packaging ? No

5. UI standards:

   • User-visible strings are internationalized using standard gettext system ? Hmm, not sure. Do the messages from the compiler tool count as user-visible strings?
   • Package with translatable strings builds a PO template during package build ?
   • End-user applications ship a desktop file ? N/A

6. Standards compliance:

   • FHS, Debian Policy Yes

   • Debian library packaging guide Yes

   • Packaging system (debhelper/cdbs/dbs) ? Patch system ? Any packaging oddities ?

7. Dependencies:

   • Depends: libc6 libgcc1 libstdc++6 python python-support
   • Are these all in main ? Yes.

8. Maintenance:

   • How much maintenance is this package likely to need ? Currently has a few patches different from debian, but our goal is to reconverge with debian and be able to just do normal syncs.

   • Who is responsible for monitoring the quality of this package and fixing its bugs ? Are they Ubuntu or Debian developers ? Iustin Pop <iusty@k1024.org> is the Debian Maintainer. Elliot Murphy <elliot@canonical.com> is also subscribed to the bugs for the Ubuntu package, and will be monitoring and helping support it.

9. Background information:

   • Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data - similar to XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.
   • What do upstream call this software ? Protocol Buffers Has it had different names in the past ? No

10. Internationalization:

    • N/A

Reviewers

MIR bug: https://launchpad.net/bugs/325784

Rick McBride <rick.mcbride@canonical.com>