[Added Gert Wollny to CC list] On Thu, 31 Jan 2008, Thies Jochimsen wrote:
today I talked to Gabi Lohmann. The whole situation with vista is quiet a mess (I am talking about the vista lib here ;-). There are several forks out there. Mine is one, another is the one by Gert Wollny you discovered at sourceforge. In addition Gabi maintains another fork which is currently closed source but she currently considers making it free. Both forks, Gabi's and Gert's, contain differing extension to the original vista library of University of British Columbia. I think, if vista should enter Debian, it can only be one of those forks actively maintained in the future. What do you think?
I'm really convinced that the Debian-Med project has not the task to
package medical software which is hanging around in tarballs anywhere
on the internet but caring for positive development in free medical
software in general. If we face the situation of different forks our
main goal should be to find out all interested persons and try to bring
them together to form a group with a common goal. So my strong proposal
would be: Please verify the possibility of merging the existing free
forks first before we start packaging a random fork. If it would be
possible to release the currently non-free one in the mean time it is
even better. I think we would do a bad service for our users if we would
stress a random fork by supporting it for no solid reason and it happens
later that our users find out that it was a bad choice.
IMHO the first step to accomplish this is to collect the mail addresses
of all upstream maintainers involved in this issue and ask them for a
statement (preferably here on this list to have a publicly available
track).
Kind regards
Andreas.
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