On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 01:50:05PM -0500, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote: > After some email lobbying and many months of waiting, more than may > seem evident from the atttached email exchange below, I have managed > to convince the authors of LiDIA > > http://www.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/TI/LiDIA/ > > to finally release their code under the GPL. Woohoo! > > It's an excellent number theory package that a mere four years ago > used to have the cutting edge algorithms for elliptic curves (hello, > Fermat's Last Theorem!). Indeed, the reason that it wasn't GPLed > earlier is that its authors had hoped to make its algorithms > proprietary, but for better or for worse have since lost interest in > this endeavour. > > In fact, hardly any (none?) of the original contributors and coders of > LiDIA are working on it anymore. I was nagging its sole "maintainer" > about getting the code GPLed so that it could go into Debian (and > hence, hopefully eventually into Ubuntu) in order to give LiDIA a > wider audience and hopefully attract some attention and maintainers. > > My questions are these: is this a good idea? Is it a good idea to try > to Debianise a package with no real upstream authors? If I did that, > would I or my sponsor become responsible for maintenance? > I think that the general consensus is that if you choose to package something that is dead upstream, you essentially accept the responsibility of being the upstream maintainer as well. On the plus side, you are not likely to disagree with yourself about Debian-related things and you are not likely to do things to make the Debian packaging more difficult than it needs to be. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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