Bug#900890: jugglemaster is dead upstream

[Helmut Grohne]

Source: jugglemaster
Version: 0.4-9
Severity: important

With my maintainer hat, I observe that jugglemaster is unfortunately
fairly dead upstream. When I was packaging it initially, they quickly
answered inquiries about licenses, but nothing ever happened to the
code.

On the Debian side, we have a fair number of portability patches now and
this is becoming more of a problem as more patches pile up. It takes the
time of those who update relevant libraries (e.g. Olly Betts).

At the time of packaging jugglemaster, there was no site swap animator
in Debian. It was the only tool for solving this job. That has changed
as well. Now there is jugglinglab. From my pov, it has a comparable
features (at least for basic needs unless you happened to use aajm as a
text mode screen saver).

Thus I believe it is time to deprecate jugglemaster in Debian. I propose
the following deprecation plan:
 * Release it with buster to have one release that contains jugglemaster
   and juggling lab.
 * After buster is released, raise severity of this bug to serious to
   kick it out of testing.
 * If nobody complains, request removal from Debian.

If you happen to read this as someone porting jugglemaster to a newer
library version (e.g. ffmpeg/wx/aa). Please speak up in this bug before
performing the porting to avoid useless work. I'm happy to consider an
accelerated deprecation if the need arises. I'm also happy to consider
keeping it longer provided that it does not slow down any library
transitions.

If you happen to read this after buster without severity serious, I
likely forgot and am happy if someone else does that.

It was a nice time with jugglemaster, but I think it is time to prepare
for a goodbye.

Helmut