Bug#701536: RM: subsurface -- RoQA; unmaintained package, maintainer MIA

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 03/03/2013 08:51 PM, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>> I'd also be happy to review and sponsor any uploads.
>
> We have several people who offered to step up, a couple of them are
> copied on this email...

Great. Just in case ;).

>>> PS: would it be useful for me to include the Debian packaging files in
>>> the git tree? we have an ancient version under packaging/debian but I'll
>>> be happy to update those if you are interested.
>>
>> Well, no, I actually would not advise doing that. Debian usually prefers
>> doing the packaging on its own, especially since when there are
>> sometimes (license) issues which make the software not comply with the
>> DFSG (which I am not assuming in this case).
>
> We are 100% GPLv2 so I don't think this would pose a problem, but I'm
> fine with that and will instead remove the outdated files from the
> sources to avoid confusion.

The license issue was just an example (hence the braces). The reasoning 
is that the Debian packaging is supposed to be independent of upstream, 
especially since we cannot always follow upstream, during a freeze, for 
example.

Assume we have version 3.0 in Debian and upstream has 3.5 and we're 
frozen. During the freeze, someone discovers a nasty bug in subsurface 
which is considered RC (release critical) in Debian, but gets fixed in 
3.5.1 upstream.

Now, since we'd be in freeze, uploading the new version 3.5.1 into 
unstable to fix the problem in testing would not be possible. Instead, 
the fix would have to be backported to 3.0 and fixed in the Debian 
packaging. If the Debian packaging would be part of upstream, 
backporting the bug would be a bit difficult since the fix would be 
realized as a patch in the debian/patches directory which wouldn't apply 
if upstream was already at 3.5.1 (which includes the fix naturally) and 
the official Debian packaging (which is at 3.0) would be part of the 
upstream repository.

I am aware that you could probably avoid this problem with branches, but 
I think it would just make things difficult. Debian cannot simply be 
up-to-date with upstream and thus upstream shouldn't maintain the 
Debian-specific part.

>> A great place for maintaining the packaging for Debian is github, for
>> example.
>
> Well - I run my own git server at git.hohndel.org but we can use
> whatever works for the packaging.

Sure, that was just a suggestion. I'd just keep it independent from 
upstream.

Adrian

-- 
  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913