Re: Does a DD become solely responsible for abandonware in Debian?
On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 09:26:16AM -0500, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote:
> 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 the case of libnoise, you are right; but, gsl has 10s of reverse deps:
apt-cache rdepends libgsl0
Justin
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