[Texmacs-dev] Re: Texmacs orphaned in Debian/Ubuntu

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 01:30:51PM +0100, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 10:52:34AM -0600, Corey Sweeney wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 10:10:41AM +0100, Bas Spitters wrote:

>>>>> Texmacs has been orphaned in Debian :-(

>>>> What does that mean, exactly? What should we do about it?

>>> What that means is that there is no longer anyone on the debian
>>> team that is assigned to maintain the debian package for texmacs.
>>> I believe if a debian package is orphaned for long enough, it can
>>> get dropped from the distribution, (...)

> That is mostly correct; technically it won't get dropped solely for
> being orphaned (at least not for some years), but if it accrues bugs
> above a certain severity level, it will get dropped. These bugs can
> be bugs in TeXmacs itself or in the packaging (e.g. a change in
> Debian Policy happens, and the package doesn't adapt to the change).

A better example of a bug in the packaging that would lead to TeXmacs
being completely broken-unusable in Debian is the point in the future
when Debian stops having Guile 1.6, but the TeXmacs package still is
linked against Guile 1.6. It must then be updated to use Guile 1.8. If
(at this future point of time which is not close to being reached yet)
nobody does it, eventually TeXmacs will be removed from Debian.

-- 
Lionel