Bug#268206: Noteedit, Finale, and testing
On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 04:21:47PM +0200, Roland Stigge <stigge@antcom.de> was heard to say:
> Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > At the moment I'm leaning towards (2). The reasons are:
> [...]
> > - 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.
>
> That shouldn't be a reason for removing the package from Debian.
>
> > - I don't use this package; I just typeset music in lilypond.
>
> Dito.
I was wondering if someone would point this out. Originally not
orphaning the package was an option and these were some of the reasons
I was thinking about orphaning it. However, I talked myself into
orphaning it immediately by the time I finished the email :-).
> > - I don't think Debian should be shipping abandonware in stable
> > releases.
>
> Maybe we should give the community more time for adopting upstream
> before removing the package entirely. Finally, it doesn't have open
> RC-bugs. Until there is an urgent need, the pressure for potential
> upstream adopters of a working program is low.
No open RC bugs is no guarantor of future non-RC-bugginess.
> > 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.
>
> Noteedit has a nice list of import (MusicXML, MIDI) and export
> (MusicXML, MIDI, ABC, MusiXTeX, PMX, Lilypond) formats, while there is
> no competition I know of.
Export to Lilypond is broken in sarge and will be unless the unstable
version makes it to sarge. Propagation from unstable to sarge is
blocked by the KDE freeze, and I just got a rejection notice from
testing-proposed-updates...apparently some archs haven't even built the
current *unstable* version after 15 days, and as a result it can't go
into t-p-u.
Furthermore, future versions of Lilypond -- say, what we will release
in etch -- are pretty much guaranteed to break backwards compatibility
*again*, and if users have started relying on it the Debian maintainer
of Noteedit (who may or may not be familiar with Lilypond *and* the
ever-changing state of its syntax) will have to patch Noteedit to keep
up or tell the users "sorry, you're SOL".
That's not to mention keeping it up to date with KDE.
> I'm for keeping the package, especially in sarge. Finally, stable
> releases are generally not changed (except for security, legal or other
> important fixes) during their lifetime, so it doesn't matter much if the
> package is maintained actively upstream.
As I said before: I don't think we should ship abandonware in stable,
and I don't think we should introduce a user program that we know will
probably be removed in the next release. If a new upstream appears for
noteedit, maybe we can include it, but otherwise I think we should not
add it to Debian. We can always add it in etch or later if development
starts up again.
Daniel
--
/-------------------- Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> -------------------\
| "...drums...drums in the deep!" |
| J. R. R. Tolkien |
\------- (if (not (understand-this)) (go-to http://www.schemers.org)) --------/
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