Re: Removing OSRM from Debian

2015-10-20 22:48 GMT+02:00 Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebastic@xs4all.nl>:

Hi Christopher & all,

We have the osrm package in Debian (and Ubuntu wily) for about two
months now, after about two years since the ITP bug was filed.

And now the upstream developers have basically asked us to remove the
package from the archive again because they cannot support it in stable
releases:

"
I talked to @TheMarex and @danpat and came to the conclusion that we
don't think it would make much sense to have OSRM packaged and
eventually shipped in a stable Debian release.
"

https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/issues/1744#issuecomment-149689363

This is sad news, but not entirely unexpected. The upstream developers
of mapnik-vector-tile also didn't see the need for Debian packages:

https://github.com/mapnik/clipper/issues/1#issuecomment-139774002

Note that in this case, there is also a good reason that mapnik-vector-tile

is only really used by node-mapnik - the separation was made only for

practical reasons.

It may or may not be a coincidence that these developers are employed by
Mapbox.

Also consider mapbox has been working hard to develop new software, and

they still are changing a lot of (crazy) things around, so they are certainly not ready

to commit to long-term support of this or that version of their modules.

But i might be mistaken, or even worse, blinded ;)

The question before us is if we want to keep osrm in Debian and
derivatives despite the reservations of the upstream developers?

Christopher, do you want to keep maintaining osrm for the duration of
stable releases without upstream support? And what are your thoughts
about osrm packaging in Debian in general?

How about keeping packaging in testing / backports ?

Jérémy