Re: Lots of packages up for adoption

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Edward Betts wrote:
> gravitywars - Game (Bugs: 0)
> 
> No Bugs, this is one of my pride and joys. It was non-free, I tracked down the
> upstream author, he no longer uses Linux, and he said I could change the
> licence to GPL. So I did, and here it is. The code is horrible, there are lots
> of places where malloc should be used, but it never appears in the source
> code. The output is svgalib, so it does not work on all archs. The code is
> hard to read because it has been designed to run fast on slow machines. It
> really needs rewriting, but I am not sure whether it is worth it or if
> anybody would be bothered. 
> 
> The upstream author sent me an new, unreleased version that uses SDL as the
> output instead of svgalib. I can not get it to run very fast on my laptop.
> 
> I can not get svgalib working on my laptop so I do not have the ability to run
> gravitywars right now.
> 
> This package can be easy to maintainer if it is left as it is, or a challenge
> if anybody wants to rewrite it. I would recommend it goes to somebody that
> plays it.
 
Wow, that's very nice. I orphaned gravitywars last year because it was
non-free. I'd be happy to take it back now that it's free. I dunno about
the sdl stuff, worth looking at anyway. As for a rewrite: not me. :-)

If I do get this package, I'd like a copy of the email from the author;
that at least should be included in the copyright file.

> xlife (Bugs: Forwarded: 3)
> 
> I do not use xlife often, there are 3 bugs associated with it, all are too
> complicated for me to fix, I forwarded them upstream to ESR, but I received no
> reply on them.
> 
> The package is otherwise easy to maintain. Should probably be taken over by
> somebody that uses, and understands it.
 
I love this package. Didn't realize ESR is upstream but what the heck, I
maintain intercal already. I'd be happy to take it.

-- 
see shy jo