On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 09:26:16AM -0500, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote: > On 18/10/06, Kapil Hari Paranjape <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> In fact, hardly any (none?) of the original contributors and coders of > >> LiDIA are working on it anymore. I was nagging its sole "maintainer" > >> about getting the code GPLed so that it could go into Debian (and > >> hence, hopefully eventually into Ubuntu) in order to give LiDIA a > >> wider audience and hopefully attract some attention and maintainers. > >> > >> My questions are these: is this a good idea? Is it a good idea to try > >> to Debianise a package with no real upstream authors? If I did that, > >> would I or my sponsor become responsible for maintenance? > > > >First of all a March 2006 release does not sound like "abandonware" in > >October 2006. Not all software packages need to be released daily :) > > Okay, fine, there seems to be one (1) guy called Cristoph working on > LiDIA, but he's not really doing much beyond minor bug-fixing. If a > major bug comes up, he gives up (I think... I could be wrong here). > LiDIA is written in C++, and I've glanced at the code, but it really > needs more maintenance than Cristoph can provide alone. The code > heavily uses some obscure features of C++, and Cristoph has warned me > that understanding it requires lots of work, especially since much of > the code itself is undocumented and the people who wrote it originally > are not interested in it anymore. The documentation too needs work, > since that old blight, code changing but documentation not, is evident > throughout the library. > > >On the other hand, I do agree with an earlier message on the following > >point. It would be nice if there were a "calculator" interface for this > >library like there is for (say) libpari. > > Hm. That would require some heavier coding I'm not prepared to do > myself. LiDIA has a sort of web interface somewhere, iirc. I'll see if > the code for that can be adapted to what you request. > > >A library alone without any > >applications that use it or user interface may not prove convincing for > >sponsors. > > Really? What about libnoise, gsl, and others? There do exist Debian > packages for "standalone" libraries, it seems. In the case of libnoise, you are right; but, gsl has 10s of reverse deps:
apt-cache rdepends libgsl0 Justin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
