Do we need an unofficial debian repository?

[Christoph Egger]

Hi!

"Desmond O. Chang" <dochang at gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Christoph Egger <christoph at debian.org> wrote:
>> "Desmond O. Chang" <dochang at gmail.com> writes:
>>> The team is inactive now.  People's bugreports and patches don't get
>>> any response.  Many packages have been removed, many are out of date.
>>> I think the slow and complicated uploading process is why the team
>>> lacks contributors.
>>>
>>> Shall we need an unofficial repo like emacs.orebokech.com to renew the
>>> removed and outdated packages?
>>
>>    I'm not necessarily convinced this would help anything. If there
>> were active people, getting DM status (enough for uploading packages)
>> shouldn't be that hard.
>>
>>    As you might have noticed, I've recently joined the team and if
>> there were some sponsoring requests I guess I could handle a few of them
>> per week quite easily right now (supposed I feel able to handle them
>> wouldn't upload e.g. clc probably).
>>
>
> Thank you for your comment.  I think I missed some points.
>
> Like what you wrote [1], There is no guide, direction and roadmap on
> the list.  So I don't know how to start working.  For example:

    Yep I realize the situation is a bit unfortunate atm.

> - Do I have rights to push my commits into the repo owned by others?

    For the pkg-common-lisp repositories I'm just pushing my changes
right now. After all it's a VCS and revert is not that difficult and --
as there's not much advice -- I had to make the decision. So far noone
has complained so I guess I was not totally wrong.

> - Would the team like to maintain the removed packages again?

    As I seem to remember most of the packages that were removed had the
problem of no upstream commitment to do releases and support them for
some time. So if you want to maintain one of these packages you'll need
to be prepared to give support for a whole release lifetime (~2 years
after the debian version is released) and fix critical bugs, select the
right snapshot to use, etc.

    If there's someone willing to do the work I will happily sponsor
such packages (the git trees have never been removed). I guess priority
should still be to fix that is in and only add stuff if there's manpower
to do it properly. (Yep I'd like to get sbcl on some of the !x86 boxes I
have again).

> - Is there any special tool for packaging?

    Yep, there's dh_lisp

> - And any specification?

    I've found [2] and it doesn't look outdated in an obvious way

    I have no problem with such e external repository existing. But I
really want to have a superb lisp environment inside proper Debian and I
guess that'll need all hands I can get.

Regards

    Christoph

> [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-common-lisp-devel/2010-June/002123.html
[2] http://pkg-common-lisp.alioth.debian.org/clid/clid.pdf