Do we need an unofficial debian repository?

[Desmond O. Chang]

Hi Christoph,

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Christoph Egger <christoph at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> "Desmond O. Chang" <dochang at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> Thank you for your comment.  I think I missed some points.
>>
>> Like what you wrote [1], There is no guide, direction and roadmap on
>> the list.  So I don't know how to start working.  For example:
>
>    Yep I realize the situation is a bit unfortunate atm.
>
>> - Do I have rights to push my commits into the repo owned by others?
>
>    For the pkg-common-lisp repositories I'm just pushing my changes
> right now. After all it's a VCS and revert is not that difficult and --
> as there's not much advice -- I had to make the decision. So far noone
> has complained so I guess I was not totally wrong.

I have no worry now.

>
>> - Would the team like to maintain the removed packages again?
>
>    As I seem to remember most of the packages that were removed had the
> problem of no upstream commitment to do releases and support them for
> some time. So if you want to maintain one of these packages you'll need
> to be prepared to give support for a whole release lifetime (~2 years
> after the debian version is released) and fix critical bugs, select the
> right snapshot to use, etc.
>
>    If there's someone willing to do the work I will happily sponsor
> such packages (the git trees have never been removed). I guess priority
> should still be to fix that is in and only add stuff if there's manpower
> to do it properly. (Yep I'd like to get sbcl on some of the !x86 boxes I
> have again).

You are right.  Maintaining CL library packages would take too much
time.  We should focus on the implementations.

>
>> - Is there any special tool for packaging?
>
>    Yep, there's dh_lisp
>
>> - And any specification?
>
>    I've found [2] and it doesn't look outdated in an obvious way
>
>    I have no problem with such e external repository existing. But I
> really want to have a superb lisp environment inside proper Debian and I
> guess that'll need all hands I can get.

I'm not familiar with clbuild, I prefer dpkg/apt.  As we discussed
above, we shouldn't maintain official libraries.  I would make a
personal repo in the future, probably.

And now, I will give my work to the team.

Thanks!

>
> Regards
>
>    Christoph
>
>> [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-common-lisp-devel/2010-June/002123.html
> [2] http://pkg-common-lisp.alioth.debian.org/clid/clid.pdf
>