[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Planning a GNUstep transition.

[Hubert Chathi]

Hello, release team,

Due to licensing issues, we have been unable to legally update the core
GNUstep libraries (gnustep-base, gnustep-gui, gnustep-back) to the
latest upstream versions while keeping all our applications.  This issue
has recently been resolved, and so the GNUstep team would like to update
the GNUstep libraries in Debian to either the latest upstream "unstable"
release, or the upcoming upstream "stable" release (which should be
released hopefully this Saturday or so).  However, this will involve a
soname bump for the libraries, so this is a library transition.

This transition should be much less painful than the last GNUstep
transition that we had; the last GNUstep transition involved extensive
changes to the build system, which required a lot of editing of source
files.  This transition should be able to be handled by just recompiling
most of the packages (a few packages may need a bit of editing, but
those should be the minority), and so should be mostly handled by
binNMUs, except in the case where we also want to update to new versions
of certain applications.

Please let us know if we can go ahead with planning a transition, or
what steps we should be taking.  We already have a fairly recent version
of gnustep-base, gnustep-gui, and gnustep-back in experimental for
maintainers to try compiling their packages against.

Thanks.

The current reverse build-dependencies of libgnustep-base-dev and
libgnustep-gui-dev are:
aclock.app
addresses-for-gnustep
adun.app
affiche
agenda.app
batmon.app
biococoa.app
camera.app
cenon.app
charmap.app
cynthiune.app
displaycalibrator.app
easydiff.app
edenmath.app
etoile
ftp.app
gnumail
gnustep-dl2
gnustep-examples
gnustep-netclasses
gnuwash.app
gomoku.app
gorm.app
gridlock.app
gtamsanalyzer.app
gworkspace
helpviewer.app
innerspace.app
latex.service
lusernet.app
lynkeos.app
mines.app
mknfonts.tool
mpdcon.app
oolite
open.app
paje.app
pantomime1.2
plopfolio.app
poe.app
popplerkit.framework
preferences.app
preview.app
price.app
projectcenter.app
projectmanager.app
remotedesk
renaissance
rssreader.app
shisen.app
stepbill.app
steptalk
stepulator.app
talksoup.app
terminal.app
textedit.app
timemon.app
viewpdf.app
volumecontrol.app
wrapperfactory.app
zipper.app

With the exception of a few, which we would want to provide new upstream
releases (and I can provide a list of them later), they should all be
able to be transitioned via binNMUs.

-- 
Hubert Chathi <uhoreg at debian.org> -- Jabber: hubert at uhoreg.ca
PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA         http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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