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

[Robert C. Helling]

On Sun, 3 Mar 2013, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:

> On 03/03/2013 10:35 PM, Cristian Ionescu-Idbohrn wrote:
>> On Sun, 3 Mar 2013, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> What about upstream keeping stuff on release branches (3.0, 3.0.2, 3.5,
>> and so on)?  And doing that sort of backporting patches themselfs?  How
>> much would that help with packaging?
>
> Yes, but that would always mean Debian somehow depends on upstream which is 
> not really a desired situation. As I said, we cannot always keep up with 
> upstream for various reasons. Debian-specific changes through patches are not 
> uncommon and it doesn't always make sense to adopt the changes upstream.

Am I right to state that for subsurface currently it is a primary goal to 
have some .deb package that could be hosted on the subsurface web server 
and which more or less tracks our releases? Getting included in the Debian 
distribution with not too old versions is also nice but more important on 
an intermediate time scale. I.e. what is currently needed is some 
tool-chain which turns (semi-automatically, that is, usable by a 
non-Debina-guru) sources that are not too different from the current state 
into a distributable .deb.

Best
Robert

-- 
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Robert C. Helling     Elite Master Course Theoretical and Mathematical Physics
                       Scientific Coordinator
 		      Ludwig Maximilians Universitaet Muenchen, Dept. Physik
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