[Pkg-bluetooth-maintainers] bluez5 in debian unstable?

[Christopher Schramm]

Hi Andreas,

blueman Debian maintainer here (sponsored by Nobuhiro).

On 09/06/2013 12:56 PM, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> If we're going to block on blueman, that might be a real problem though...

Uh oh, trouble ahead...

> Quoting from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Bluez5 :
> "Blueman is abandoned upstream and is going to be dropped from Fedora 20."

Yes, I can confirm blueman is abandoned upstream. The sole maintainer 
did not have the time to continue development so there's nothing 
happening there.

> I can help but wonder if the Debian maintainer of blueman is willing
> to invest enough in this package given the lack of upstream support.

The only real option is to adopt the upstream development. bluez is by 
far not the only problem. Others are e.g. network-manager compatibility 
and a number of both device-specific and generic (major) bugs.

I do not think it makes any sense to tackle the bluez problem without 
considering the other issues. I've already discussed removing blueman 
from Debian with some people some time ago and we did only decide 
against that step, because it still worked for at least some use cases. 
If nobody picks up the project, that won't be true anymore with bluez 5.

I'll think about adopting the project myself, but I could only start in 
about two or three months and I am not sure if I will constantly find 
the time to keep it going then (some contributers would help, of course).


TL;DR: If upstream is not revived, I'd suggest dropping blueman in favor 
of bluez 5, since it has many other upstream problems as well.

Cheers