Re: IBM/Hashicorp Vagrant - non-free and no maintainer?
[Replying personally as well as on list to match your message sent to me]
On Mon, Jun 09, 2025 at 09:27:49AM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On 09-06-2025 08:12, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> > Debian bug 1049999 refers: it looks as if there is now no active
> > maintainer and so we probably can't keep this in for the lifecycle of
> > Trixie.
>
>
> That bug is rather long, do you have a summary? Why wouldn't we able to keep
> it? If that's true it should go now, instead of then. But on the other hand
> we have a whole lot of packages that have no active maintainer and that are
> behind upstream, so you need a stronger argument than that.
>
> Paul
>
Hashicorp chose a non-free licence in late 2023. At that point, one of the
two Debian maintainers had already more or less given up maintaining Vagrant
having been burned previously by maintaining Chef which also changed licence.
There then followed a period of waiting to see what happened. Lucas is
unwilling to maintain this in non-free and has dropped the maintainership.
In the interim, Hashicorp has lost one of its founders and been bought for
$6.4bn by IBM. We can maintain a *very old* free licensed copy maybe
but Lucas has already moved on, as has most of the rest of the world.
if anyone *really* want Vagrant to remain in Trixie - where we already do
slightly differently from upstream in that they seem to prefer Virtualbox
virtualisation - someone has to commit to another five years of support
of an old codebase with a near zero possibility of cooperation from upstream.
There are a few scripting packages that depend on Vagrant but if there's
no Ruby expert that wants to maintain this for the foreseeable future,
best it goes now, maybe.
Appreciating that this is late in the cycle, it's a lot easier to remove
potentially problematic packages than to find someone to commit to maintain
them.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy
(amacater@debian.org)
Lucae
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