Hello, On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote: > After some email lobbying and many months of waiting, more than may > seem evident from the atttached email exchange below, I have managed > to convince the authors of LiDIA > > http://www.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/TI/LiDIA/ > > to finally release their code under the GPL. Woohoo! Congratulations. This looks like an excellent library. > In fact, hardly any (none?) of the original contributors and coders of > LiDIA are working on it anymore. I was nagging its sole "maintainer" > about getting the code GPLed so that it could go into Debian (and > hence, hopefully eventually into Ubuntu) in order to give LiDIA a > wider audience and hopefully attract some attention and maintainers. > > My questions are these: is this a good idea? Is it a good idea to try > to Debianise a package with no real upstream authors? If I did that, > would I or my sponsor become responsible for maintenance? First of all a March 2006 release does not sound like "abandonware" in October 2006. Not all software packages need to be released daily :) So you could go ahead and package it---but without any assurance that it will make it to Debian. (I am not a DD so I can't help either). At least I *will* download it and try to use it! On the other hand, I do agree with an earlier message on the following point. It would be nice if there were a "calculator" interface for this library like there is for (say) libpari. A library alone without any applications that use it or user interface may not prove convincing for sponsors. In principle, this should be possible with extensible scripting languages like guile, python, perl. In practice ... this may take a lot of work! Regards, Kapil. --
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