Elmer version

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hi, Admar,

I'm sorry about the delay in your getting a response. Please see inline
below.

على الجمعـة 24 حزيران 2016 ‫13:25، كتب Admar Schoonen:
> Dear Debian maintainers,
> 
> The current version of Elmer in unstable is very old
> (6.1.0.svn.5396.dfsg2-4+b2; judging from http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sc
> i/physics/elmer/bin/windows/2011/ this is from September or October
> 2011). 
> 
> The homepage of Elmer (https://www.csc.fi/web/elmer/binaries) contains
> a link to a PPA with more recent versions (currently 8.2-
> 201606211331~0b361b5~ubuntu16.04.1). I am using that version now but
> would love to see it in mainline Debian.
> 
> Is there a specific reason why Debian has such an old version?
> 

The specific reason is probably that nobody has spent time on it. The
last commit to the packaging VCS was over two years ago. The last upload
to the archive was a couple months before that, in late 2013.

There seem to be license issues that haven't been sorted out and the QA
team has even filed for removal of the package from the archive
altogether [1].

The only way to keep it in Debian would be to find someone (or become
someone) who is interested in taking care of the package here. Perhaps
you might be able to convince the people involved in the Ubuntu
packaging to get involved with it here. As far as I know, most of the
benefit to Ubuntu was that the software was newer than in Debian Stable,
but we have stable-backports which can sometimes provide newer packages
than Ubuntu.

Many thanks and regards
Afif

1. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=823379

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name