[Pkg-electronics-devel] Reviving the fped package in Debian

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

I recently discovered that the fped package in Debian is about five years out 
of date:

https://packages.debian.org/sid/fped

It turns out that the Vcs-Git field in the control file refers to the upstream 
sources and not the packaging files:

https://qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/vcswatch?package=fped

These files have been moved to the following location:

https://github.com/xiangfu/deb-pkg/tree/master/fped

(I am not completely sure that the location is fully compatible with the 
Debian infrastructure tools, though.)

Since some people are still using fped in their projects, it might be nice to 
provide an updated version in Debian. So far, I have looked into doing the 
following:

 * Updating the control, copyright (and compat, source/format) files
 * Incorporating the patch provided in bug #928321 [*] within patches
 * Running dpkg-buildpackage to check that the package still builds

There are a few other things that might be worth doing:

 * Introducing a watch file, although the download archives are not
   particularly accessible to uscan
 * Investigating the special changelog and clean scripts
 * Updating the rules to adopt current practices

I'm not completely sure if the original package maintainer is still active, so 
I have copied him on this message. I have also copied the original developer 
on this message as well.

I don't really want to take over maintenance of this package: I just want to 
put it back on track within the automation provided by Debian so that newer 
versions can eventually be provided.

Thanks for any attention that anyone might be able to give to this matter!

Paul

P.S. I hope that this list isn't one of those write-only lists with only spam 
and automated messages, which is what the archives seem to suggest.

[*] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=928321