xboard packages

[h.g. muller]

Dear Sirs,

I noticed that the last xboard version available as a Debian package is 
4.2.7. This lags rather far behind with xboard
development, which is curently at at 4.3.15 (obtainable, for 
instance,  from the WinBoard forum
http://www.open-aurec.com/wbforum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=49439&sid=bc1de781c5d 
e50a59ee039dc4fbd7cb4 ).

The reason I am contacting you about this now, is that the GNU Savannah 
team will release a new version from their
website, xboard 4.4.0, any day now. This is essentially a 'reverse 
takeover' of the official fork (which died around 2003)
by the unofficially continued development since then.

It woulld be a good thing if this new release could go accompanied by the 
release of an official Debian package.
But the GNU-Savannah xboard development team never contained a Debian 
maintainer. In fact it contains only
a single active member, (Arun Persaud), and does not even include me (the 
programmer responsible for most of
the development of XBoard from 4.2.7 to 4.3.pre16).

I would like to learn the opinion of the Debian games team with respect to 
this issue, and if positive, to learn of
the best way to proceed on this.

I am also interested to see the Fairy-Max Chess engine (which replaces GNU 
Chess as preferred engine for use
with the new XBoard, as it supports many more Chess variants than GNU 
Chess, including Chinese Chess) released
as Debian package, but I am not really a Linux man, and not up to the task 
of official maintainer.

Hoping for a quick reply,
with kindest regards,
H.G. Muller