Neurodebian packaging and build system development

[leej3]

Neurodebian packaging and development of AFNI's build system

• Yaroslav Halchenko, Dartmouth College (@yarikoptic)
• John Lee, Team AFNI (@leej3)

Neurodebian provides software repositories for the Neuroimaging community to achieve easy and reproducible Neuroimaging software environments. AFNI has been available through this channel for many years but development effort for each software release has been high. This project sought to generate a recent release of the AFNI software suite on NeuroDebian. More importantly it sought to harmonize AFNI's build system with the requirements dictated by Debian software distribution to enable a higher frequency of releases on the Neurodebian infrastructure in the future.

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Deliverables

Significant progress was made in developing AFNI's build that is based on the cross-platform and highly configurable cmake build system. Problems/solutions during the project included:

• Using gdb to inspect the call stack during a segfault that was preventing the AFNI GUI from starting. This was due to the order of linking of motif and X11 libraries.
• Creating "find modules" for software that are often installed on software platforms but are distributed by AFNI to ease installation due to frequent compatibility/installation issues. Configurable usage of system installations of these software packages are required for the correct and legal distribution of software that the Debian software ecosystem enforces.
• Tools for surface analysis in human Neuroimaging (roughly encompassed by AFNI's SUMA ecosystem) were added to the cmake build.

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Ongoing collaboration

Although no Neurodebian release was made, a release will occur shortly after the hackathon event. The progress made by this project dramatically improves software packaging for the AFNI team and will greatly facilitate future releases for the Neurodebian packaging resource.

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Resources

afni/afni#126
afni/afni#127

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