Do we need an unofficial debian repository?

[Christoph Egger]

"Desmond O. Chang" <dochang at gmail.com> writes:
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Christoph Egger <christoph at debian.org> wrote:
>> "Desmond O. Chang" <dochang at gmail.com> writes:
>>> - 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).
>
> You are right.  Maintaining CL library packages would take too much
> time.  We should focus on the implementations.

    Well having libraries inside Debian has great benefit and there are
some still in the archive. The amount of work required just greatly
varies depending on how the upstream projects work (e.g. it helps a lot
if they have stable releases and support them for quite some time).

    And having lots of stuff which is all broken doesn't buy much of
course. So adding new (or old, previously removed) stuff should best be
done when we know we can handle the rest.

>>> - 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    I've found [2] and it doesn't look outdated in an obvious way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.
>
> I'm not familiar with clbuild, I prefer dpkg/apt.  As we discussed
> above, we shouldn't maintain official libraries.  I would make a
> personal repo in the future, probably.

    Well if you don't have the time/motivation/whatever to maintain them
in Debian properly a private repository is definitely a way out (I'm
using trac plugins that way). If you would do all the work for your
private repository I'd opt for share.

> And now, I will give my work to the team.