Re: VISTA, VIA, MIA

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Michael Hanke wrote:

> Since there was no progress I decided to put some effort into it. I
> have choosen VIA as the project to provide support for the vista format.
> VISTA itself is dead. There is also MIA which seems to be maintained as
> well, but since Lipsia (which is really my target) needs VIA anyway I
> went for that.

I'd regard this as a very reasonable decision.

> I prepared a package for VIA (full program: libvia0, libvia-dev,
> via-bin, libvia-doc). If anyone needs that urgently please contact me.
> Otherwise I'd prefer to keep it on my disk for two pending reasons.
>
>  1. I performed a "copyright triage" to determine a possible legal
>     issues. That resulted in a rather big debian/copyright and revealed
>     a problem that makes the package unaccetable for Debian in its
>     current shape. However, upstream know about the issue and agreed to
>     resolve it -- expected timeframe: weeks.
>
>  2. Significant pieces of the code stem from the early 90s and really
>     deserve some attention. While forstering the code to build proper
>     shared lib packages I made significant changes and also moved to a
>     CMake-based build system. All those patches are currently inspected
>     by upstream. They need careful checking to ensure proper functioning
>     and the chance to increase the likelihood to get some stable
>     library API in turn.

These two reasons do not provide a reason to not commit your packaging
stuff to Debian Med SVN.  I'd really love if you would do so.  This
would enable us to keep information up to date in our tasks files and
might enable people to build and test private packages (regardless the
copyright issues).

> Overall, the pending work will take a few more months. I will announce
> the corresponding packages whenever I have a working Lipsia package (and
> hence also a proper VIA package) in all respects.
>
> I won't submit an ITP now, since it makes no sense till the legal issues
> are resolved.

Sounds reasonable - but please consider commiting your packaging stuff
to SVN.  You might gain profit from patches provided by other interested
persons.

Many thanks for your work on this

        Andreas.

--
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