[Debichem-devel] Jmol: Seeking new maintainer or considering removal

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 07:10:44PM +0100, Daniel Leidert wrote:
> Jmol is a nice and useful 3D chemical structures viewer application,
> which is written in Java. It can be run as a standalone application
> and it also ships an interactive web browser applet and a Java
> development tollkit.
>
> Since some time the Jmol package is lacking behind the latest upstream
> releases. Current version in Debian is 12.X whereas upstream already
> reached 14.X. With the release of the 13.X series, Jmol added some
> more external libraries, which it uses and ships. So to get the latest
> Jmol release into Debian/main a maintainer is required, who is willing
> to maintain Jmol along with its dependencies. This requires some basic
> Java knowledge. Also note, that the upstream build system (the last
> time I checked) usually puts all classes - Jmol and its dependencies -
> into one JAR file, so you usually have to hack the build system too.
> 
> If nobody steps up, I'm going to request its removal from Debian, as
> it seems unuseful to me, to ship an outdated piece of software.

If somebody wants to step up to help, be my guest.  Note that I believe
there is/will be a Javascript version of Jmol at one point, which might
make some thing easier, not sure.

In any case, I plan to update it in time for the jessie freeze at least,
but I currently don't have a lot of time to dedicate to it.


Michael