Removal of packages Beast and Rapicorn in 2014

[James Cowgill]

Hi,

On Sun, 2015-10-18 at 22:43 +0200, Tim Janik wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/beast
> https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rapicorn
> 
> show that Beast and Rapicorn have been removed from Debian last year.
> 
> Reading up on the bug reports, it seems that:
> a) It was assumed the packages are unmaintained upstream;
> b) a guile-1.8 dependency of Beast was becoming a problem for Debain.
> 
> (a) is not true, Beast *and* Rapicorn have seen releases and active
> development in git last year:
> https://github.com/tim-janik/rapicorn/graphs/contributors
> https://github.com/tim-janik/beast/graphs/contributors
> 
> (b) was unknown to upstream, it would have been great if upstream was
> notified in any way to accommodate.

Here are the legitimate removal reasons I could find:

In the case of beast, it looks like the Debian package was simply not
maintained, and after an RC bug was opened for a few months the package
was removed to complete a transition. Nothing was said about whether
upstream was active.

For rapicon, there was a lull in development (as you can see on the
github contributors page) early 2014, just before the package was
removed.
From this page it was failing to build on all arches:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=rapicorn
Also libraries providing no executables and with no reverse-deps are
often "easy" to remove without interfering users too much.

In any case, the reasons don't really matter much now that the packages
have been removed.

> We're now in the process of rolling our own deb packages and apt
> repository, but ideally that effort would channel back into Debian.
> Is there a way to find a sponsor for uploads of third-party packages
> who can provide packaging feedback, or simply a Debian maintainer
> that bothers enough to actually notify upstream about packaging
> issues?

If you are willing to maintain the package yourself in Debian, then
please read this:
http://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers

If you're looking for sponsors, try posting in any relevant packaging
lists (possibly including this one) and/or file a sponsorship-requests
bug.

Thanks,
James
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-maintainers/attachments/20151018/5d95b692/attachment.sig>