RFH: giac (provides xcas) -- pre-O, in fact

[julien.puydt@gmail.com]

Hi,

I took over maintaining giac under the debian science team umbrella
more than two years ago. It's a useful (and used) piece of software,
but I found working on it increasingly difficult and frustrating:

- my discussions with upstream have been a bit too rough a bit too
often for my taste (the items below should make clear what the tensions
were about) ;

- upstream keeps on adding things because they're useful but doesn't
really documents licenses, and I know I've fallen behind on checking
everything and updating d/copyright (the doc/ directory is especially
interesting -- from the top of my head magnets, the graph theory
manual, the javascript bits... might not be documented correctly) ;

- trying to provide patches to improve/fix the code is pretty hard when
upstream doesn't use any source code versioning system, considers any
old code could still be useful one day and hence keeps *everything* 
with #if 0/#endif and other peculiarities ;

- the fact that we don't ship the documentation properly means the
package isn't as useful as it should. This is due to license issues --
in fact I'm not sure everything we ship is really ok even though the
Files-Excluded list is huge. Perhaps the package should be moved to
non-free and Debian could ship much more of it, in particular the
french part, as it's very widely used here at the lycée level [15-18
years old])?


In any case, I don't want to work on it anymore. If someone wants to
step up, the above gives hints on what is to be done -- please remove
me from uploaders.

In a few weeks, if nobody made a move, I'll just orphan the package.

Cheers,

J.Puydt