[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#1023795: Please undo the replace of pgplot with giza-pgplot

[Ole Streicher]

Hi,

I am the Debian maintainer of giza. I still think that the main problem 
here is that pgplot is not free software and therefore cannot be part of 
Debian; see Debian Policy section 2.2.1. The same applies to packages 
which depend on pgplot, like libpgplot-perl.

I would in the first place ask to report and discuss the compatibility 
problems with upstream <https://github.com/danieljprice/giza>.

The other way to go forward would be to apply to the copyright owner of 
pgplot (Caltech institute) to request a license change to an Open Source 
compliant license, and (once this is done) to ask the pgplot5 Debian 
maintainer to upload pgplot5 to the Debian "main" archive. Note however, 
that pgplot5 is not a well-maintained package (last upload by its 
maintainer is now 11 years ago), so volunterring to take over pgplot5 
maintainance would be probably the best way to push this forward.

Giza is here the wrong package for this issue; it should be re-assigned 
to libpgplot-perl; the discussion about pgplot (and its licensing) 
itself should happen in a bug for the pgplot5 package.

When pgplot5 is going to be repackaged for Debian "main", we should 
discuss how to resolve the package conflicts between the two packages; 
however this should happen after a license change for pgplot.

Best regards

Ole