Re: What to do about the situation with id3v2

[Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>]

Since upstream is effectively dead, for Debian's purposes, you have
the same responsibilities as upstream.

Given the above, why not take over the upstream project. The mailing
list still seems active so theoretically upstream could give you admin
access to the sourceforge project and you could work on the code there
and produce new releases. At the same time you could invite the
maintainers of id3v2/libid3 in other distros (run whohas to find them)
to join upstream and merge their patches so that you won't be alone.

I can't really see a "right" answer here, everything requires a lot of
work or is a suboptimal solution.

I also that there are quite a few id3 related command-line tools and
libraries in Debian, it would be nice to unify all of those into one
library:

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=id3

You might want to mail the maintainers and upstreams of all the
relevant ones, some might be willing to join libid3 upstream.

In case you are thinking of dropping libid3, the following are the
reverse deps and reverse build-deps that would need to be ported or
dropped. You might want to talk to their maintainers and upstreams:

# Broken Depends:
clam: libclam1.4 [alpha amd64 armel i386 ia64 mips mipsel powerpc s390]
djplay: djplay [alpha amd64 armel hppa i386 ia64 kfreebsd-amd64
kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390 sparc]
easytag: easytag
gmediaserver: gmediaserver
id3v2: id3v2
intone: intone [alpha amd64 armel hppa i386 ia64 kfreebsd-amd64
kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390 sparc]
kid3: kid3
      kid3-qt
liblicense: liblicense3
ripperx: ripperx
splay: splay [alpha armel hurd-i386 i386 powerpc]
tagtool: tagtool

# Broken Build-Depends:
clam: libid3-3.8.3-dev
djplay: libid3-3.8.3-dev
easytag: libid3-3.8.3-dev
flac: libid3-3.8.3-dev
gmediaserver: libid3-3.8.3-dev
id3v2: libid3-3.8.3-dev
intone: libid3-3.8.3-dev
iripdb: libid3-3.8.3-dev (>= 3.8.3-5)
kid3: libid3-3.8.3-dev (>= 3.8.3-4.2)
kwave: libid3-3.8.3-dev (>= 3.8.3-4.2)
liblicense: libid3-3.8.3-dev
ripperx: libid3-dev
splay: libid3-3.8.3-dev
tagtool: libid3-3.8.3-dev

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise