Re: Soundkonverter renoved from Debian 13 ;-(
Le 22 août 2025 11:14:05 GMT+02:00, phil995511 <phil995511@proton.me> a écrit :
>Hello Aurélien, and thank you for your reply.
>
>You mean that Soundkonverter has no longer been maintained or developed by the KDE team for 8 years now?
Yes.
> If there's no maintainer/developer on Debian to take care of it, we should find one instead of removing this software from Debian.
I don't know who you mean by "we" so you will need to be more specific whether *you* are going to do the work or if you're asking someone else to do it for you in case "we should" will hardly do the job.
There are several maintainers in the Debian Qt/KDE team. But we don't ship unmaintained (by upstream) software.
So *you* would need to find a maintainer who is ready to maintain in Debian software that is unmaintained upstream which goes back to adopting the package and becoming upstream, as I wrote in my previous message.
> Many people use it because it's simply excellent! And I've never detected a single bug in it, unlike many other software programs available on Debian.
That's good to know but not good enough to make it into a stable Debian release.
But you're free to get it from any other non-Debian source since it's a leaf package not depended on by other software, so feel free to look for it as a snap package, flatpak, appimage… After a quick look I couldn't find any of these which reinforces my opinion that we did the right choice by removing it from Debian.
>To better answer your question, there's been a controversy in recent years about software programs being removed from distributions because they're no longer updated. I'd like to tell you that as long as they don't have any proven security vulnerabilities and they work perfectly, they should never be removed from distributions. As they say in the IT world, when something works perfectly, you shouldn't touch it again or you'll break everything. Indeed, when a software is super hyper optimized and virtually bug-free, if you touch it, you'll just add bugs that weren't there before.
I don't know what controversy your talking about but Debian as a project takes its own decisions and individual maintainers or teams do the same in there respective perimeters.
And we're not leaving in a static world. the software stack moves on and you need people to actively evolve software to stay compatible with recent versions of KDE Framework libraries, Qt, compilers, multimedia encoders stacks…
It's all very doable but noone has steped up to do so. It seems to me there's not enough interest in doing so by people actually capable of doing the work.
Unfortunately you don't get to choose where volunteers spend their time so "we should"s and "you should"s are not going to cut it.
But if you manage to find it a new upstream maintainer for it we will happily upload it back into Debian.
Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien
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