Re: Does a DD become solely responsible for abandonware in Debian?
On 18/10/06, Kapil Hari Paranjape <kapil@imsc.res.in> wrote:
> 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?
First of all a March 2006 release does not sound like "abandonware" in
October 2006. Not all software packages need to be released daily :)
Okay, fine, there seems to be one (1) guy called Cristoph working on
LiDIA, but he's not really doing much beyond minor bug-fixing. If a
major bug comes up, he gives up (I think... I could be wrong here).
LiDIA is written in C++, and I've glanced at the code, but it really
needs more maintenance than Cristoph can provide alone. The code
heavily uses some obscure features of C++, and Cristoph has warned me
that understanding it requires lots of work, especially since much of
the code itself is undocumented and the people who wrote it originally
are not interested in it anymore. The documentation too needs work,
since that old blight, code changing but documentation not, is evident
throughout the library.
On the other hand, I do agree with an earlier message on the following
point. It would be nice if there were a "calculator" interface for this
library like there is for (say) libpari.
Hm. That would require some heavier coding I'm not prepared to do
myself. LiDIA has a sort of web interface somewhere, iirc. I'll see if
the code for that can be adapted to what you request.
A library alone without any
applications that use it or user interface may not prove convincing for
sponsors.
Really? What about libnoise, gsl, and others? There do exist Debian
packages for "standalone" libraries, it seems.
In principle, this should be possible with extensible scripting languages
like guile, python, perl. In practice ... this may take a lot of work!
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In
practice, there is. ;-)
Cheers,
- Jordi G. H.
Reply to: