Package: wnpp
Severity: normal
I intend to orphan the prcs package.
The package description is:
PRCS, the Project Revision Control System, is the front end to a set
of tools that (like CVS) provide a way to deal with sets of files and
directories as an entity, preserving coherent versions of the entire
set.
.
Its purpose is similar to that of SCCS, RCS, and CVS, but (according
to its authors, at least), it is much simpler than any of those
systems.
.
Emacs-Lisp support is distributed in a separate package, prcs-el. Another
package called prcs-synch contains a tool to synchronize PRCS projects
between repositories, both locally and remotely.
.
Homepage: http://prcs.sourceforge.net
This package is practically dead upstream, even if its author claims that he
still intend to work on it. I have dreamed for a long time of PRCS
replacing CVS worldwide, which could have happened if PRCS2 would have come
out. Instead of keeping waiting for that, I converted myself to Subversion
and I must confess that I have no intention to use PRCS anymore. It is too
bad, because PRCS is a very well written piece of software. Unfortunately,
it is becoming a museum item.
Under these circumstances it makes no sense for me to keep the maintainance
of the Debian package. For those distressed about losing PRCS forever, I
added a present in my last upload (version 1.3.3-3): a script, called
prcs2svn, which converts a PRCS project in a Subversion repository. It is
not perfect, but allows to store the history of your projects under PRCS
control in a SVN repository. I also contributed it to the prcs project at
SourceForge (but I am afraid it will never be released...). You can find
the script either in the Debian package or at:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/prcs/prcs1/prcs1/contrib/prcs2svn/
The binary Debian packages being orphaned are the following:
prcs
prcs-el
prcs-synch
prcs-utils
prcs-visualtree
They are lintian-clean, apart a warning regarding CVS directories in the
source tarball. There is a substantial amount of bug reports filled against
the packages: 8 for prcs, 2 for prcs-el, and 2 for prcs-utils, and 1 for
prcs-synch. 11 of them are tagged upstream and one relates to FTBFS on
am64d using gcc 4.0 (there is a patch for it). Only one bug against prcs-el
is pure-Debian.
I was very pleased in maintaining the prcs package over 6 years. I wish
good luck to the next maintainer!
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-1-686
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)