Guidance on how to update an old package [editline/libeditline]
Hello everybody,
I'm looking to get some guidance on how to update a package that seems to be in the packaging limbo.
The package in question is editline [1], which from what I understand, it is integrated into the debian sources. Somewhere around 2010 it was integrated into an external repo and continue to be developed there [2], it has been around ten years since the last change in the version that is packaged in Debian.
Recently I reached to the author of the newer editline and created an issue to get additional context on why that has been the case [3], from what the current maintainer of the upstream project replied, it seems that the debian maintainer is either no longer interested on updating the package or has some additional opinion on why is not a good idea to include the new version in debian.
Quoting from the issue in the upstream editline project:
>>> I have contacted the Debian maintainer several times, proposing they switch to my version,
>>> but not even once has he written back, so after a while I gave up and added my own
>>> debian/ packaging, based on the official. But if someone else is willing to put in the time
>>> and effort to talk to the Debian people, I'm more than willing to help out any way I can.
The Debian maintainer in question is Sam Hocevar, which from I could gather, he is no longer active in the Debian project, at least not as a package maintainer.
And just to wrap up (also mentioned in the GitHub issue), personally I have a particular interest in this package because is a dependency of Nix and the packaging effort of nix in debian [4] would benefit itself by having a recent editline in the official repos, currently they have opted for trying to implement readline support in nix PR1/merged [5] PR2/pending [6] instead of packaging this library. At this time, Nix doesn't have the autocomplete functionality for the readline build option and it seems that the the Nix maintainers are even reconsidering the idea of allowing the extra option to support readline and stick only to editline.
I hope that some Debian mentor in this list could give me any guidance on how to move on given the current situation.
Thanks.
--
Joel Rivera
[1]: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/editline
[2]: https://github.com/troglobit/editline/
[3]: https://github.com/troglobit/editline/issues/42
[4]: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/nix
[5]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/2551
[6]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/3196
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