Time to orphan libquicktime?

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 12:38 PM, IOhannes m zmölnig
<zmoelnig at umlaeute.mur.at> wrote:
> On 03/17/2014 12:34 PM, Alessio Treglia wrote:
>> How are you? I hope you're doing well.
>
> thanks alessio for asking burkhard.
>
> it seems, that he did not include the list in his answer, so i forward
> it (with his permission):
>
> On 04/02/2014 06:23 PM, Burkhard Plaum wrote:>
>> Well I wouldn't consider it dead, since I still receive and apply
>> patches. Official releases however are rare nowadays, that's right.
>>
>> There are quite a number of users and patch submitters, mostly people
>> within companies developing in-house tools (the most prominent is
>> Pixar).
>>
>> The point is, that I don't use it personally anymore and thus don't
>> actively hack on it. In my opinion it's too specific to be considered
>> a "mainstream" library but too precious to be abandoned. If I'd find
>> someone, who could take over maintainership without screwing it up,
>> I'd happily give it away.
>>
>> For debian packagers I cannot give an advice. Are there any other
>> packages depending on libquicktime?"

The number of packages dependening on libquicktime is not zero, but
not too bad either, I'd say:

$ ssh mirror.ftp-master.debian.org dak rm -s unstable -Rn libquicktime
Will remove the following packages from unstable:

libquicktime |  2:1.2.4-4 | source
libquicktime-dev | 2:1.2.4-4+b2 | amd64, armel, armhf, hurd-i386,
i386, kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390x,
sparc
libquicktime-doc |  2:1.2.4-4 | all
libquicktime2 | 2:1.2.4-4+b2 | amd64, armel, armhf, hurd-i386, i386,
kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390x, sparc
quicktime-utils | 2:1.2.4-4+b2 | amd64, armel, armhf, hurd-i386, i386,
kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390x, sparc
quicktime-x11utils | 2:1.2.4-4+b2 | amd64, armel, armhf, hurd-i386,
i386, kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390x,
sparc

Maintainer: Debian Multimedia Maintainers
<pkg-multimedia-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org>

------------------- Reason -------------------

----------------------------------------------

Checking reverse dependencies...
# Broken Depends:
dvgrab: dvgrab [amd64 armel armhf i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390x sparc]
gem: gem-plugin-lqt [amd64 armel armhf i386 kfreebsd-amd64
kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390x sparc]
gmerlin: gmerlin-plugins-base
kino: kino [amd64 armel armhf i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390x sparc]
mjpegtools: liblavfile-2.1-0
mlt: libmlt6 [amd64 armel armhf i386 kfreebsd-amd64 kfreebsd-i386 mips
mipsel powerpc s390x sparc]
pdp: pd-pdp
transcode: transcode [amd64 armel armhf i386 kfreebsd-amd64
kfreebsd-i386 mips mipsel powerpc s390x sparc]
xawtv: xawtv-plugin-qt [amd64 armel armhf i386 kfreebsd-i386 mips
mipsel powerpc s390x sparc]

# Broken Build-Depends:
dvgrab: libquicktime-dev (>= 2:1.0.0+debian)
gem: libquicktime-dev
gmerlin: libquicktime-dev
kino: libquicktime-dev (>= 2:1.0.0)
mjpegtools: libquicktime-dev (>= 2:1.0.0+debian)
mlt: libquicktime-dev
pdp: libquicktime-dev
transcode: libquicktime-dev
xawtv: libquicktime-dev (>= 0.9.9)

Dependency problem found.


I understand from this bug that there is little interest in
maintaining this package further neither in Debian nor upstream.
Therefore, let's orphan this package properly, and file bugs against
the packages listed above to stop depending on libquicktime. As soon
as those packages are fixed, we can remove libquicktime from the
archive.

Any objections to that?

Reinhard