Debian maintenance of my GNU packages
Dear Debian Hackers,
I'm contacting you as the maintainer of three GNU packages, GNUnet, GNU
libextractor and GNU libmicrohttpd.
I'm increasingly concerned about the placement of stable versions with
APIs that have not changed in years in Debian's "experimental"
distribution -- or in the case of GNUnet, the shipping of versions of
the code that no longer work with the current P2P network and thus
regularly shine a bad light on Debian and GNUnet, as users naturally try
our the ancient packaged versions first and regularly end up disappointed.
GNU libextractor's current 0.6.x-release series is only available in
Debian experimental. The version available in Debian unstable is from
July 2009. Why?
GNU libmicrohttpd's current 0.9.x-release series (we're at 0.9.19!) is
also only in Debian experimental. The version available in Debian
unstable is from March 2010. Why?
GNUnet's current 0.9.x-release series is not even in Debian
experimental. Debian stable, testing, unstable and experimental ship a
now dysfunctional version 0.8.1a from February 2010. Why?
Even against the 'experimental' versions of the packages, no bug reports
have been filed. We used to have a great relationship with our Debian
maintainer (Daniel Baumann), but he has been quite inactive recently
and/or only uploaded packages to 'experimental'. Would it be possible
for some of you to help out and ensure that package updates happen in a
somewhat timely fashion and are placed into the appropriate group
(stable code does not belong into experimental) based on technical merit?
Clearly the problem here is not so much that the packaging work has not
happened (some of them exist in experimental!) or that the software is
causing technical problems. Thus I'm appealing to you to sort out
whatever issues are preventing the regular promotion of "my" packages in
the Debian distribution.
Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake and Arch Linux are shipping much more recent
versions of these packages (for a while), so why not Debian? (Note that
I'm comparing unstable against stable releases of those other
distributions here. I personally appreciate Debian's
stable/testing/unstable system, but relegating stable, standard software
like GNU libmicrohttpd that is fit for 'stable' to 'experimental' upsets me.
I've previously e-mailed Stefano Zacchiroli about this and he suggested
I should e-mail this list for help (as he lacks the appropriate magic
wand or incantation).
Happy hacking!
Christian
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