[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Is anyone maintaining gnustep-dl2? (was: RFS: gnustep-dl2 NMU fixing #360547 and #293025)

[Hubert Chan]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:02:51 -0500, "Anthony Juckel" said:

> I was trolling for some low-hanging fruit in the Debian RC bug report
> the other day, and came across the gnustep-dl2 package which seems to
> be rather unmaintained (Brent, correct me if I'm wrong).

> I packaged up a version fixing bugs #360547 and #293025, and updating
> the standards version and FSF mailing address.  It's been uploaded to
> my unstable apt repository at http://juckel.net/apt/unstable.

Anthony, thanks for your contribution.  Brent is, AFAIK, inactive and
has orphaned gnustep-dl2, and I believe nobody has taken up gnustep-dl2,
so yes, it does seem to be rather unmaintained.  In fact, I think that I
was supposed to request its removal, but apparently I haven't done that
yet.

Is anyone going to claim gnustep-dl2?  If not (since no other package
depends on it), I'll request removal, instead of letting it sit there
unmaintained.  (I'll give about a week to respond.  If I don't hear
anything within a week, I'll request removal.)  If anyone is going to
claim gnustep-dl2, please look at Anthony's patch.

Anthony, I hope that you don't feel like your work is wasted if
gnustep-dl2 gets removed.  I appreciate your interest in helping Debian,
and I hope that you will continue contributing.

FWIW, I took a quick look over your NMU, and I have a few comments:
- your fix for #293025 is different from the patch submitted in the bug
  report, so it would probably be good to explain (probably by mail to
  the bug report) why used the fix that you did, instead of the one from
  the bug report.
- you should note in the changelog all changes that you make.  And that
  includes fixing the FSF mailing address, and bumping the standards
  version.
- your patch also removes some files found in the previous version.
  These are CVS files, and so it's fine for them to be removed (and in
  fact, CVS files shouldn't be in the package anyways), but it's another
  thing that should be noted in the changelog, if this is something that
  you intentionally wanted to do.  You can check the difference between
  your .diff.gz and the previous .diff.gz by using the interdiff tool.
  I find it very handy for NMUs (and for my own uploads as well), to
  make sure that I didn't change anything that I didn't intend to
  change.
- this is a GNUstep-specific comment, but for most GNUstep packages,
  especially library packages such as gnustep-dl2, it is now also
  necessary to add a call to gsdh_gnustep in the debian/rules file, in
  the binary-* targets.  This is due to a change in directory structure
  between the Debian versions of gnustep-make (and -base) 1.09 and 1.10.
- your NMU would also have fixed #343202, by nature of building against
  a newer version of postgresql-dev.

Other than that, your NMU seems to be pretty good.

Again, thank you very much for your contribution, and I hope that you
will continue helping to improve Debian.

-- 
Hubert Chan - email & Jabber: hubert at uhoreg.ca - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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