Noteedit, Finale, and testing

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

  I was just looking at whether to upload noteedit to
testing-proposed-updates.  In the process, I hit the noteedit homepage,
and discovered that upstream has apparently abruptly ceased development
and removed his web page because of a potential possible future port of
Finale to Linux.

  I am trying to decide between the following options:

  (1) Orphan noteedit. (already done, working on QA-maintained uploads now)

  (2) Orphan noteedit *and* request its removal from unstable and sarge.


  At the moment I'm leaning towards (2).  The reasons are:

    - due to its wide dependency tree, and particularly its dependency
      on tse3 (another troublesome package), noteedit has been a pain
      since I took it over.

    - major functionality in the program (ie, playing the score I'm
      editing) has never worked for me, maybe because I don't have a
      sound card with a good MIDI synthesizer.

    - I don't use this package; I just typeset music in lilypond.

    - I don't want to take over upstream maintainence of noteedit.
      Whoever adopts this package will also pretty much have to become
      upstream, even if they just stick to fixing bugs.

    - There are alternatives in unstable/sarge.  I've heard that
       rosegarden4 may be better, for instance....although on my
       computer it just hangs forever when I start it.  In addition, I
       think that Rosegarden is unlikely to suddenly replace its
       homepage with a message saying "because ot [sic] the upcoming
       Finale port the RoseGarden development ends here."

    - I don't think Debian should be shipping abandonware in stable
      releases.

  If someone wants to step up and take over Debian *and upstream*
maintainence for noteedit, please let me know in the near future; if
there are users who really need noteedit, please let me know.  If I
don't hear from either group in the "near" future, I will file a bug
against ftp.debian.org requesting the noteedit be removed from both
unstable and sarge.

  I will continue to maintain tse3, so noteedit will be buildable on
sarge.

  (please include me or debian-devel in replies, as I am not presently
   subscribed to debian-user)

  Daniel

-- 
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
|            "But what *does* kill me bloody well leaves me dead!"            |
|              -- Terry Pratchett, _Carpe Jugulum_                            |
\---------------------- A duck! -- http://www.python.org ---------------------/