State of the slimserver package.
I'm in a quandary about the future of the slimserver package.
There's a problem with upstream: it contains a significant amount of
non-free stuff, which had to be ripped out of the software before it
went into Debian. This means that the Debian package is missing some
functionality, and that the process of going from an upstream download
to a Debian package is a huge amount of work. The non-free stuff is
firmware images, graphics, fonts and HTML for the web interface.
At the time I put slimserver into Debian, there was no upstream .deb
available, and there was a significant possibility that the restrictions
on what could go into the official Debian package would be relaxed.
Neither of these facts is still true.
Upstream now makes available a repository with complete .debs and
dependencies: installing the lastest release means adding the
slim-devices package repository to sources.list and running apt. The
packages seem to be of good quality, but probably not a completely
seamless upgrade to the current debian package. The packages are not
DFSG-compliant: they contain the whole of the software, with nothing
removed, but the non-free stuff (missing in the official .debs) is not
re-distributable. Source packages are not provided. The packages were
based on at least some of my packaging work, but they have diverged
considerably.
SlimDevices was bought, last year, by Logitech. I understand that there
is now no real chance of more of slimserver becoming DFSG-free.
The package in unstable is now signifcantly out of date, so I need to
decide if I should put considerable effort into making new packages.
I've already done enough work to determine that this will not be
trivial. Given that Squeezebox users can now get Slimserver, packaged
for Debian, directly from SlimDevices, I'm not particularly motivated to
do this.
It's a pity that an un-crippled SlimServer package can't go into Debian,
but that seems to be case, for the forseeable future.
So the question is, what should I do? Should I try and maintain a
parallel and not-as-good package in Debian? Should I orphan the package
in case anyone else wants to try? Should the package be removed from
Etch+1? If so, how can we tell users to go direct to SlimDevices instead?
Cheers,
Simon.
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