Re: What to do with a dead upstream popular application (IceWm) ?
On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 02:50:45PM +0100, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> So the question is: what shall I do with Icewm since it is
> is quite popular in Debian? Since bugs can't be fixed, shall
> I orphan it? Any other idea?
> The ideal would be that someone decides to spend some time
> on the code and become a motivated upstream developer.
This is more a question than a proposal: if the upstream has been
declared dead and it seems that the package won't be supported never
anymore, would it be possible to identify a substitute application
(another window manager in this case) and (I'll speak for this case)
make a new icewm package that depends on the other one and uses a script
to convert the configuration files to the format used by the replacement
window manager?
icewm could then be deleted and the users will have migrated to the new
one. The migration icewm could ask for confirmation with debconf,
stating that the old icewm package can't be maintained anymore, that
they can choose the automatic migration at any time or stay with the
unmaintained software.
Of course in your case you need a window manager that can replace icewm
and is able to provide the same functionality, look and feel and memory
footprint, I don't even know if it exists...
I'm writing this supposing that icewm users are not migrating from an
unsupported and buggy wm because of the burden involved in finding a new
one and converting all their customizations to it. A scheme like this
could be useful in such scenarios.
Bye, Enrico
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
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