Hi, I took over maintaining giac under the debian science team umbrella more than two years ago. It's a useful (and used) piece of software, but I found working on it increasingly difficult and frustrating:
- my discussions with upstream have been a bit too rough a bit too often for my taste (the items below should make clear what the tensions were about) ; - upstream keeps on adding things because they're useful but doesn't really documents licenses, and I know I've fallen behind on checking everything and updating d/copyright (the doc/ directory is especially interesting -- from the top of my head magnets, the graph theory manual, the javascript bits... might not be documented correctly) ; - trying to provide patches to improve/fix the code is pretty hard when upstream doesn't use any source code versioning system, considers any old code could still be useful one day and hence keeps *everything* with #if 0/#endif and other peculiarities ; - the fact that we don't ship the documentation properly means the package isn't as useful as it should. This is due to license issues -- in fact I'm not sure everything we ship is really ok even though the Files-Excluded list is huge. Perhaps the package should be moved to non-free and Debian could ship much more of it, in particular the french part, as it's very widely used here at the lycée level [15-18 years old])? In any case, I don't want to work on it anymore. If someone wants to step up, the above gives hints on what is to be done -- please remove me from uploaders. In a few weeks, if nobody made a move, I'll just orphan the package. Cheers, J.Puydt
