Geant4 - outdated and not maintained

[Frank Schima]

On Oct 30, 2012, at 7:31 AM, Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> The maintainer of Geant4 doesn't respond to any of my emails or any ticket.
> 
> I would like to see Geant4 upgraded to 9.5 and I would like to create
> and maintain a port for Gate 6.2. I have a working CMake-based port
> for Geant4 9.5, but it still needs some work to support all the
> options that are currently supported in 9.4.
> 
> I have a meeting with one of the developers of Gate on Thursday. I
> hope that he will help me resolve some problems I have with building
> the current version of Gate (no developer uses Mac OS X, so support is
> very limited). The latest version of Gate depends on Geant4 9.5, so I
> really need the latest version if I want to create a port for Gate.
> 
> My questions are:
> - Is anyone else willing to take over maintenance of Geant4?
> - Would it be acceptable to have versioned Geant4 ports and if so -
> how many versions would be acceptable? Would it be ok to have support
> for 4.9.4, 4.9.5 and 4.9.6? The last one is experimental and the
> versions are not really compatible with each other. The version 4 in
> Geant4 is really a different program from Geant3. So the numbering is
> actually 9.4, 9.5 and 9.6. Physicists usually need a very specific
> version to run their applications. (There is one additional number,
> for example 4.9.5.p02 to denote patchlevel 2 - something that can
> safely be upgraded without the need for a special version.)

Please attach a patch to the update ticket [1] and I will take a look at it. It is well past maintainer timeout and we can apply a working update anytime now. 

I believe we should simply have a geant4 port with the stable version 4.9.5. Then we should either create a new port for 4.9.6 or just add a sub-port for it in the current geant4 portfile. If someone specifically needs an older version, they should open a port request ticket and we could potentially make a new port for it. Since you say the 4.9.4 series is not cmake based, making a sub-port for it might not make sense. 


Cheers!
Frank

[1] <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/32716>