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Bug#890598: RM: dolibarr -- ROM; too much work to maintain it properly in Debian



Package: ftp.debian.org
Severity: normal

I'm the usual sponsor of dolibarr in Debian. The maintainer (and
upstream author) Eldy Destailleur announced me a few weeks ago that he
will no longer be maintaining Dolibarr within Debian because it was
too much of a pain to respect all the Debian requirements.

He explained to me that Dolibarr relies on 15 javascripts libraries (some of them
are dependencies of the libraries that Dolibarr are using in the first
place) and 5 PHP libraries.

Debian's requirement to provide a non-minified copy of the javascript is
really hard to meet for him because often the projects are only providing
the sources under the form a github link (and not under the form of
a non-minified javascript that we could put next to the minified file to
please lintian). He would have to spend a lot of times with the different
upstreams to get them to provide the non-minified file in a form that is
suitable for Debian. It's even likely that his requests would be dismissed
by multiple upstream authors leaving him in the inconvenient position of
having to remove features to be able to ship a policy-compliant Debian
package.

The requirement to use packaged versions of all the libraries is also
problematic. More often that not the version used by Dolibarr will not
match the version currently available in Debian and it's always a risk
to use a different version. Sometimes it will work just fine, sometimes it
will break.

Given all those constraints, he decided to stop trying to maintain
Dolibarr in Debian and the Dolibarr project will only provide an
unofficial .deb embedding all the libraries that they need.

I doubt anyone else is willing to maintain Dolibarr in Debian and I'm
thus requesting the package to be removed. Users are better served
by the upstream unofficial package rather than by Debian's outdated
package (it's outdated due to the difficulty of updating it in a
policy-compliant way).

I would hope that we could find a way to get the best of both worlds
but right now it seems that we don't have a good solution for that kind
of web application.

Thank you.


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