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

[Sylvestre Ledru]

On 04/03/2013 09:24, Robert C. Helling wrote:
> 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.
In our context, we are focusing on Debian (and Ubuntu) themself. That
means that, we are trying to propose the version matching the
dependencies in the archive.
However, if there is a need, we can always provide backports.

By the way, I started to work on the packaging. I updated
libdivecomputer and I am working on subsurface.

Sylvestre