Hi, I am a member of the Debian Astro and Debian Science teams.
As you may know, PLplot has a Debian package that was also shipped with the latest Debian release [1]. However, the package is outdated and not properly maintained anymore, and so our MIA team decided to "orphan" the package [2], which means that it needs a new maintainer. Since PLplot is a dependency of a number of astronomy packages, I decided to take over the maintenance of PLplot, and to put it under Debian Science team maintenance. This basically means that the Debian specific files are going to be maintained on the Debian infrastructure <https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/debian-science/packages/plplot.git> instead of being part of the original tarball. The reason is that we want to have an easy way to change the Debian files if needed. For example, in preparation of the last Debian release, we already needed to apply some changes, which are now not reflected in the original PLplot git repository. What I already did with PLplot is to change the Debian packaging structure (git branches, patches) to use the "git-buildpackage" way of building Debian packages, and to update to the latest PLplot version (5.12.0). The next step is to simplify the structure of the Debian specific files and to update them for the latest tools that help to build debian packages, and to fix the Debian specific bugs that popped up in the last years. My first question is now if there is a volunteer to help or even take over the maintenance of the package. The volunteer should join the Debian Science team for the packaging. If someone wants to take over, we will help if there are any problems with the packaging. If you want to help, please contact me; by directly by e-mail, or via our mailing list <debian-scie...@lists.debian.org>. The other point is already older, but a show-stopper: PLplot uses a few old libraries from Pavel Sakov (CSIRO Marine Research), in lib/csa and lib/nn. These libraries have a license that is not free (in the sense of the Debian Free Software Guidelines [3]), and they are incompatible to the LGPL of plplot. I already wrote an E-mail to the mail address given in the README to ask him for a license change, but I am not sure whether Pavel's address is still valid. There was already some discussion on Debian mailing lists about that topic 9 years ago [4], but I couldn't find a (follow-up) discussion on the plplot-devel mailing list. Was there any discussion, and what is your opinion about that license? If you have other comments on the Debian packaging, I would be also very glad to hear from you. Best regards Ole [1] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plplot [2] https://bugs.debian.org/867049 [3] https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines [4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2008/10/msg00002.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
