Bug#933128: libparse-debianchangelog-perl: Unsuitable for Bullseye unless someone becomes upstream

[intrigeri at debian.org]

Package: libparse-debianchangelog-perl
Version: 1.2.0-13
Severity: serious

Hi,

many years ago, the Debian Perl group has unwillingly inherited the
role of de facto upstream maintainer for this package: all changes
done since 2011 were applied as Debian patches. We don't feel we're in
a good position to wear the upstream hat here and would rather not to.

Therefore, at the pkg-perl BoF today at DebConf, after pondering other
options such as orphaning this package, we decided that we don't want
this package to be included in Bullseye (at least, maintained under
the Perl team umbrella) unless someone else steps up and becomes its
upstream maintainer. Hence, we're filing this RC bug to alert about
this situation. I'll also file bugs against all reverse-dependencies,
pointing to this discussion.

libparse-debianchangelog-perl has quite a few reverse-dependencies,
some of them critical to Debian (such as Lintian) or to our own team
(dh-make-perl, pkg-perl-tools) so let's hope that something good comes
out of this currently unsustainable situation. For example:

 - Users of Parse::DebianChangelog could list their minimal
   requirements for a new implementation.

   This could be useful in case someone is ready to write and maintain
   something like this, but does not want to maintain the current
   codebase and its full API.

 - Someone takes over Parse::DebianChangelog and becomes the
   new upstream.

 - <insert here your own candidate solution>

Note that libparse-debianchangelog-perl is on the list of key
packages¹ so this RC bug won't trigger the autoremoval machinery for
it, nor for any of its reverse dependencies.

[1] https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/key_packages.yaml.cgi

Cheers,
-- 
intrigeri