Re: package versioning
I maintain chktex which got to a similar situation where some "upstream"
work was done in the Debian diff. At some point, I tried to locate
upstream again and couldn't. What I did is open a project in
savannah.gnu.org to maintain the software "upstream" there.
There is no announcing that you need to do IMO, you just start to
maintain it yourself, I'd suggest providing a place to get upstream
updates for others outside of Debian and package that for Debian.
In my case I also created a FreshMeat entry and uploaded chktex to CTAN,
only because these are the likely places for others to search for such a
program.
I did a similar thing with websec but there upstream exists but decided
not to maintain the software anymore, I contacted him and asked for
permission (though I could do it without permission too, it's GPL). And
again I opened a project on Savannah for it.
If in your case, upstream is not active anymore, try to contact him. And
if he is unreachable or says that he no longer maintains the software,
just start maintaining it as upstream author and set version numbers as
you see fit.
Baruch
* Michael Moerz <mikem@natoka.dyndns.org> [030112 16:13]:
> Hi!
>
> I am maintaining metamail and my problem with that piece of software is
> that there is no upstream anymore (for several years now). So I had to
> keep the source tidy completely by my own.
> Some day I got struck by the idea to adopt the software to automake
> and change a bit the directory structure (which is cleary not so good).
>
> So I the .diff rather big now (bigger than the orig.tar.gz). And this
> leads me to the question, if I shouldn't increase the version number
> from 2.7 to 2.8 . But before doing so, should I declare myself as new
> upstream ? That leads to the question where should I do that ?
>
> --
> kind regards,
> Michael Moerz
>
> pub 1024D/B651C436 2000-09-17 Michael Moerz <e9625136@stud3.tuwien.ac.at>
> Key fingerprint = 55DB 2F1A BF45 DBAB F542 4128 2173 8753 B651 C436
> http://idc19.itm.tuwien.ac.at/~mikem/private/mikem.public.gpg.key
--
Baruch Even
http://baruch.ev-en.org/
http://www.nongnu.org/chktex/
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