MintPy in Debian

[avalentino]

Hi,
I would like to inform you all that a Debian package for MintPy is now in the official Debian archive.
This means the MintPy, and also pysolid and pyaps, can be installed on Debian with a simple apt command:

$ sudo apt install mintpy

The package should flow to Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives as new releases come.

Please refer to the /usr/share/doc/python3-mintpy/README.Debian file for more details.

Any feedback is very welcome.

[yunjunz]

This is awesome @avalentino! Thank you for making it happen!

We should add this to the installation note. It would be helpful to also add a link to the "Debian derivatives" OS names, to help users who are not familiar with Debian (like myself) to decide if this option works for them.

I have a couple of questions:

1. Will the apt install works for pysolid or pyaps alone, e.g., if one wants to install pysolid only without mintpy?
2. How does the maintenance of the debian/mintpy work? Will it be updated for every release made in this GitHub repo, manually or auto-synced like this using github workflow?

As for the feedback, the instruction you showed is clear and straightforward, I would only suggest maybe using mintpy_ as prefix instead of mintpy-, so that it is more consistent in style with other snake_case script names?

[yunjunz]

Thank you for the explanation @avalentino, and for the maintenance.

Could you please also update the installation with the apt install on the repo of pyaps and pysolid?

I agree that changing in mintpy setup.py is the way to go. Since this change will affect all the current users with existing installation methods, I prefer to wait for a future time to do this, when we have more compact script names and numbers.

[avalentino]

OK, I will update the script prefixes in the debian package ASAP.

Regarding possible future evolutions of the entry points for mintpy, an option could be to provide a single entry point (mintpy) with multiple sub-commands. This one could live side by side with the current entry point for a TBD transition period.
If you think the the approach makes sense I could work to a PR in that direction.

Could you please also update the installation with the apt install on the repo of pyaps and pysolid?

sure, I will do it ASAP.

[yunjunz]

Could you explain a little bit more about the single entry point approach? Is that what gmt is using? And in that case, what people should do if they want to run non-mintpy commands?

[avalentino]

I don't know well gmt but yes, the approach seems similar.
The single entry point (the mintpy script) will provide access to all functions currently provided bu the set of entry point currently provided via sub-commands:

$ mintpy -h

USAGE: mintpy [-h][options]

Long desctiption

Subcommands:
  ...
  pre_snap:          description
  smallbaselineApp:  description
  save_qgis:         description
  view:              description

To access the specific function:

$ mintpy smallbaselineApp [-h][options] <arguments>

Not sure about what you mean by "non-mintpy commands".
The idea is that, in principle, any function available in the mintpy python package can be (eventually wrapped and) exposed as a sub-command.

[yunjunz]

Thank you for the explanation @avalentino. Yes, this single entry point sounds great to me! A PR is more than welcome.

[avalentino]

FYI: all the packages are now also available for Ubuntu 22.04 on the eotools PPA: https://launchpad.net/~a.valentino/+archive/ubuntu/eotools?field.series_filter=jammy

[yunjunz]

Very cool! Thanks!