[Pkg-octave-devel] Sundials is way outdated

[Dima Kogan]

Andreas Tille <andreas at fam-tille.de> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 01, 2017 at 11:48:08PM +0000, Ghislain Vaillant wrote:
>> > I admit I would have prefered if you would have left you as owner and
>> > would take over the lead here.
>> 
>> I thought I was stepping on someone else's work (Dima or James) and
>
> If this would have been the case Dima or James should have responded in
> the last three days, right?

Right. If you want to do the required work in the near term, then by all
means, please do it.


>> that an official update to a more recent release was already underway.
>> Hence myself leaving the RFA up for whoever was in charge.
>> 
>> I should state upfront that I am not comfortable with the way this
>> packaging effort has been performed so far. Looking at the history,
>> Dima started the work on 2.7 and imported the Debianization from svn,
>> without any consideration for past work nor policy. The very minimum
>> would have been to start with a `gbp import-dscs` if a proper import
>> from svn was too hard to achieve, despite the process being documented
>> in different places on the Debian wiki.

I don't remember exactly what I was thinking when I did this. Normally,
I'd import the old repo, but clearly I did not do that here. Yes, that
is bad. Sorry. The existing new git repo isn't really used by anybody,
and rebasing on top of a new svn import would be fine. I don't think
you'll be confusing any existing users.


>> Finally, considering the complexity of this software, it would be nice
>> to clarify upfront who is intending to maintain sundials long-term.
>
> +1
>
>> Again, looking at the history, Dima kickstarted the update effort for a
>> week in October last year, and apparently gave up afterwards. That does
>> not sound like a confident statement for long-term maintenance to me.

I needed packages for a new version of this library, so I did some of
that work in the git repo yall have seen. At the same time I wrote that
email to the debian-science mailing list. Talking to James on that
thread, we decided to leave this alone until after stretch was out the
door, and to pick it up again then. Plan for the future: if someone here
wants to do the packaging and maintenance, please do that. If nobody
wants to, I'll do it.


>> I hope you guys understand my concerns here.
>
> I fully share your concerns.  Dima and James claimed that they are happy
> with their work for local usage but this does not help from a Debian
> point of view at all.  @Dima & @James: Could you please explicitly lay
> out your plans here until weekend.  In case we do not hear from you I
> think the best plan is to redo the SVN-Git conversion.

Agree completely. Sorry for the mess.