[tryton-debian] Future of the Tryton suite in Debian

[Mathias Behrle]

Dear fellow developers,

while it is unusual to publish the plans for every and each package I am
posting nevertheless this informal message, because there are 100+ packages
involved.


The short message

I don't plan to continue the maintenance of the Tryton suite in my *free* time.


The current state

- The migration of team and repos to salsa is finished.
- An actualized and quite up-to-date version 4.6.x of all
  packages is uploaded to unstable.
- The last bug fix release was uploaded.
- I will continue to package the bug fix releases for 4.6, but I won't package
  the new upcoming version 4.8 under current circumstances. 


What does this mean?

Unless someone steps up to sponsor financially the packaging or takes over the
maintenance I will orphan the suite in due time before the release of buster
and recommend its removal (version 4.6 will be unsupported at the approximate
ETA of the release of buster).


The background

I am maintaining the suite since now ~8 years, being member of the Tryton
project since the very beginning since ~10 years. My primary motivation was to
give some important reference to the Tryton project as well as to complete the
userland of Debian. I considered this to be a win-win-situation for Tryton as
well as for Debian users.

The current evaluation of the situation shows unfortunately a different result:
- After years of continued discussions and confrontations I have to realize,
  that the Tryton project still doesn't meet my least expectations of a real
  community project. Furthermore the work of maintaining Tryton in Debian is
  quite low valued in Tryton. Constitutional questions and differing opinions
  are mostly considered annoying. There is a clear tendance to prefer exclusive
  instead of inclusive behavior (which e.g. recently led due to poor and
  repudiative communication to the removal of the OpenSUSE packages from the
  website).
- The benefit of Tryton in Debian main is quite limited for our users. To get
  a sustainable solution it is mostly better to use the backports at
  debian.tryton.org. Thus the packages in main are indeed a very good base to
  start the backports from, but they are not really the best alternative for
  everyday use.

Having said this it is now no more appropriate to invest my personal free time
into it. I will be glad to continue the work, if some user or company will step
up with financial sponsoring.


So far in a nutshell,
Mathias


-- 

    Mathias Behrle
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