Info about PDCURSES, a X11/SDL curses package

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hello Agustin, all,

2012/7/18 Agustin Martin <agmartin at debian.org>:
> I currently do not plan to become Debian main maintainer for this
> package, but my git repo may be useful to anyone interested. I could
> however help if needed.

I don't have major objections if somebody wants to take care of it,
but I am really not interested in this package.

If there's mainly this "the" editor only depending on it, which is not
terribly popular (popcon: 79 [1]) and can work in ncurses anyway; and
asciiportal, I am honestly not sure if it's worth the burden;
especially if the upstream project is not very active and if it has
its share of oddities compared to the main SDL modules (image, ttf,
mixer...).  I've been working with some other fringe SDL modules
lately, trying to bring them up to date before the release, and
they're not terribly fun to deal with -- in fact, sdl-stretch has
still to migrate, it wasn't ever enabled for non-i386 arches, not even
for amd64 with all of these years present, and nobody noticed :-(

Also, there are busy times ahead for SDL team, with the new Debian
stable release within sight and important changes such as multi-arch,
which can give us one or two headaches.  If SDL upstream finally
decides to release v2, there should be also quite a lot of changes and
duplication of packages for a while to take care of, and new software
exposing SDL2 to new bugs.  Any extra load will be detrimental to the
state of the main packages.  I don't know what the other people think
(Dominique, Felix-es, Sam, anybody else?), but I think that it would
be more wise to spend time e.g. trying to get SDL2 working.

However, if you or anybody else are really interested, perhaps that
person can maintain it as part of the SDL team, and we could give some
support from time to time.


Cheers.

[1] In principle I don't like to throw packages away just because of
low popcon, but I think that some of the packages are very
"under-tested", sometimes completely buggy with nobody
noticing/bothering to report.  I am interested in SDL especially
because of a couple of projects that I use, but I don't even have
installed more than half of our packages, so I already don't feel very
comfortable with having to maintain packages that I don't use.

-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>