SANE packages unmaintained : intent to take over
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Hi,
A few days ago, a small thread [1] on -devel complained about SANE
packages (namely source packages sane-backends, sane-frontends and
xsane) being unmaintained.
I hereby announce my intent to *take over* the maintenance of these
packages, their current maintainer being clearly MIA. Anyone objecting
to this, please speak up now.
I have formed a small team composed of Aurélien JARNO
<aurel32@debian.org>, Guido GUENTHER <agx@debian.org> and me. Anyone
wanting to give a hand is welcome.
Maintainers depending on SANE and users of unstable might want to test
my 1.0.8-1 packages of sane-backends and sane-frontends, and my 0.88-1
packages of xsane. They are built from stock upstream source tarballs.
Those packages are up on [2]. This is an apt-able repository ; put the
following line(s) in your /etc/apt/sources.list :
deb http://people.debian.org/~jblache/SANE unstable main
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~jblache/SANE unstable main
i386 and powerpc binaries are available, along with sources and
binary-all packages. If you have another architecture at hand, please
contact me so we can work something out.
A few comments on these packages :
- a new dependency is introduced : libieee1284, and is up at the same
address. I will ITP this library shortly, as it's needed for the
CANON_PP backend to work ;
- sane-backends (libsane) was built with a maximum of backends
enabled. I enabled the gphoto2 backend, so there are quite a few
dependencies, and it's still unclear whether the final packages
will be built with gphoto2 enabled or not. Only the PINT backend
was left behind ;
- sane-frontends (sane, sane-gimp1.2) : sane no longer depends on The
GIMP. If you want a GIMP-enabled version of the sane package,
install sane-gimp1.2 instead ;
- xsane (xsane, xsane-gimp1.2, xsane-common) : xsane no longer
depends on The GIMP. If you want a GIMP-enabled version of the
xsane package, install xsane-gimp1.2 instead. Xsane was not built
with GTK 2, because of the libpng issue which makes it impossible
to install libpng2-dev and libpng3-dev at the same time, which
would be needed to be able to build xsane (GTK 2) and xsane-gimp1.2
(GTK 1.2) from the same source package. A new xsane-common arch-all
package is built, containing the HTML documentation, some data
files and the locales, for a total amount of around 2 MB, so it's
worth it ;
- for sane and xsane, GIMP 1.3 flavours might be built at some point,
I need to have a closer look at this ;
- all packages were repackaged from scratch, using debhelper.
Aurélien has put together a list of bugs for the 3 source packages,
which gives us the following estimation, after a quick review (for
unstable) :
- 43 bugs in sane-backends, of which 13 can be closed, another 3
could be closed but require further investigation ;
- 24 bugs in sane-frontends, of which 9 can be closed, another 8
could be closed but require further investigation ;
- 25 bugs in xsane, of which 12 can be closed, another 5 could be
closed but require further investigation.
The remaining bugs have a good chance to be fixed too, but tests
require some hardware we don't have, so we are going to contact their
submitters to have them test the packages if possible.
We are now going to investigate each bug to determine whether it's
fixed or not, affects stable or not, etc.
If you have reported a bug against one of these packages, and run
unstable, please install these packages, try to reproduce the bug, and
mail me and the bug log (xxxxxx@bugs.debian.org, where xxxxxx is
the bug number) with the result of the test.
After we have done that, we will happily upload the new SANE packages
to unstable, closing an amazing number of bugs.
That done, we will roll out an update for stable, trying to fix as
many bugs as we can.
This is our roadmap as of now.
There are a bunch of wishlist bugs asking for new upstream versions to
be packaged, yet another bug of this sort was filed yesterday against
libsane (#162532). It's time.
As a last note, if you're compiling SANE by hand because of a backend
not included in the official SANE distribution, please mail me with
some details about this backend (URL, etc.). I'm thinking of a
libsane-extras (or whatever) package containing such backends, so
Debian users would be more comfortable with SANE in Debian.
Thanks for reading me, any comments welcome, flamewars go to
/dev/null, please.
JB.
[1] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200209/msg01551.html>
[2] <http://people.debian.org/~jblache/SANE/>
--
Julien BLACHE <jblache@debian.org> | Debian, because code matters more
Debian & GNU/Linux Developer | http://www.debian.org
Public key available on <http://www.jblache.org> - KeyID: F5D6 5169
GPG Fingerprint : 935A 79F1 C8B3 3521 FD62 7CC7 CD61 4FD7 F5D6 5169
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