Re: IBM/Hashicorp Vagrant - non-free and no maintainer?

[Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org>]

On 09/06/25 at 18:17 +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> [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.

Hi Andrew,

In #1049999, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans@eds.org> said he would take
over maintenance of the vagrant package in Debian.

Hans-Christoph, can you comment on whether that's still the case?

Lucas