[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#814222: openslide 3.4.1 is out

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Benjamin,

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 08:52:36PM -0500, Benjamin Gilbert wrote:
> Hi, upstream OpenSlide maintainer here.  The patch Mathieu mentioned is only
> needed for libjpeg-turbo == 1.2.0, so it shouldn't be necessary unless there
> is a desire to support building the source package on Ubuntu 12.04. 
> Otherwise, I would expect the OpenSlide 3.4.1 update to be a simple version
> bump, plus maybe switching the libopenjpeg dependency to libopenjp2.

Thanks for showing up here and explaining the background.

> More generally, I'd very much like to see OpenSlide continue to be packaged
> in Debian and its downstreams.  OpenSlide has infrequent releases, and I try
> to be a well-behaved upstream, so I hope maintenance of the package wouldn't
> be a significant burden.  If there's anything I can do to help, please let
> me know.

I guess there is something you might like to do.  The background for my
unusual response to a bug report is, that Mathieu did a very good job
for about three years to integrate a lot of medical imaging packages
into Debian and than struck us with the message that he lost interest
and leaves everything behind for the rest of the team.  Keeping all his
work up to date is beyond my time limit I could spend (which is even
higher since I'm not from the field of medical imaging and thus even
incompetent to understand the details of the software).

However, we made good experiences to guide upstream how to work with the
packaging version control system (SVN or Git at your choice) update the
packaging and I just check and upload to the Debian mirror.  Since the
packaging for OpenSlide is basically done this should be not to hard.
We have formalised the teaching of upstream into our workflow in
something we call "Mentoring of the Month"[1].  If you like to sneak a
bit into Debian packaging and update the files in Git/SVN (just tell me
your preference) I'd consider this a nice solution.

Kind regards

      Andreas.


[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM

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