Re: State of the slimserver package.
Steve Greenland wrote:
On 05-Mar-07, 15:12 (CST), Simon Kelley <simon@thekelleys.org.uk> wrote:
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.
None of which is a problem for the copyright holder distributing these
packages.
Agreed. It only affects Debian.
The packages were based on at least some of my packaging work, but
they have diverged considerably.
What was your license? Do you feel that your copyright has been
violated? If so, is it worth pursuing? Understand, I'm not urging you to
do so, just raising questions and causing trouble :-).
I've no complaint, legally or morally: I have not asserted copyright
over the packaging work, and I gave implied consent for its use.
The package in unstable is now signifcantly out of date, so I need to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.
I don't see much reason for you to do so. People buying a Squeezebox
understand the situation they're getting into. I'd wager that the vast
majority of slimserver users use the original upstream package - I do
myself, as there wasn't a Debian package when I first installed, and I
didn't even notice your packages until a few weeks ago.
Do you have any idea how many people actually use your package?
Some, at least, do: I worked through some bugs with the existing (6.3.0)
package, and there are serveral bugs filed to the effect of "please
bring this up-to-date". Last time I checked it didn't register
significantly on popcon.
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?
I'd say do a new upload of your existing version, but add a
NEWS.Debian.gz describing the situation, and say that you're not going
to update the packages, and point people to the upstream archive. Try
to get this into Etch (should be okay with no functional changes.) Then
pull from Etch+1.
I'm inclined to agree, in fact further investigation shows I have no
practical choice, since there is only one HTML skin which doesn't
include non-free HTML and is therefore usable by Debian. That skin is
disabled in the latest release, apparently unmaintained.
I'll make a "so long and thanks for all the fish" upload.
Cheers,
Simon.
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