Control: retitle -1 Package is severely outdated Control: severity -1 serious
This package is severely outdated. esptool v2.8, as currently packaged in Debian, was released in October 2019, almost 3.5 years ago. Upstream has regularly released newer versions every few months in the meantime, with the latest being v4.5, released last week. Newer versions bring a myriad of fixes, as well as equally importantly, support for newer chips that can be found in the wild. As I've also reported in #948096, esptool in Debian is crippled right now by not including any flasher stubs, limiting its usefulness. The removal was justified at the time, but some of the underlying reasons have been resolved for a long time now for several of the supported chips, and only require simple patches to be applied to restore. (Also note: the packaging and DFSG-ness can be simplified quite a bit, since the binary blobs are now split into JSON files in the build tree, that can be cleaned up with Files-Excluded, removing the need for modifying the source through the uupdate script.) Given how outdated the source is, and the lack of responses from the maintainer in the BTS, I do not believe the package is fit for the next release, therefore I'm elevating the severity to RC. I should note that while the package seems to meet the criteria for Salvaging (DevRef 5.12) I don't currently have the bandwidth to maintain it properly in the long run either. I'm happy to do a one-off NMU to bring it to a more decent shape, however. Best, Faidon
