Hi,
I am writing all interested parties I have heard of because I am
slightly concerned about the state of the barry packages in Debian,
and consequently in Ubuntu: the last maintainer upload (by Jose Carlos
Garcia Sogo) is more than two years old. Since then, two
non-maintainer uploads fixed the most important problems, but the
general state has room for improvements, and it's been lagging behind
upstream for more than two years.
However, I'm pretty sure we can reach some kind of successful outcome
if a handful of us give a hand.
In the hope to get things started, I have imported all recent Debian
uploads into a Git repository - gbp + pristine-tar -style. Then,
I have cherry-picked a trunkload of commits that seemed worth it from
upstream's packaging repository, maintained by Chris; the resulting
delta is quite small, most differences can be easily explained and
hopefully resolved; I must say Chris already does most of the work of
maintaining Debian packages of barry, although unfortunately not as
part of Debian (more to come later, please read on). While I was at
it, I've also fixed a bunch of trivial packaging errors detected
by Lintian.
The resulting source package builds properly. I cannot test it as
I don't own the hardware barry is meant to support. I think it's worth
being uploaded to Debian unstable, and is unlikely to make things much
worse than they already are.
My Git repository can be cloned this way:
gbp-clone git://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/barry.git
The resulting package would solve at least the following issues:
* deprecated Udev rules issues
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/barry/+bug/500370
* Debian bug #582187: Manpage references to a non-existant URL
* Debian bug #598878: typo in package description
* Debian bug #582189: New upstream version available
Additionally, I think the new upstream release may also fix the
following issues, although I've not checked in details:
* Debian bug #600469: No mount possible due to 10-blackberry.rules
* Debian bug #582195: Cannot backup content as a regular user
(permissions issue)
However, on the short run, a few other problems would need fixing to
get things up-to-date with current packaging standards:
* deprecated debhelper compatibility level (4)
At least the way -dbg packages are currently built is not
compatible with newer levels.
* ancient Standards-Version (3.8.0)
A look at the upgrading checklist would be worth it.
Hopefully the version can be bumped with no changes.
* missing manpages for bktrans, brimtrans and btranslate
Would be nice to fix too:
* missing debian/watch
* package descriptions are quite short and rough on the edges
* no symbols control file for libbarry0
* libraries package name not reflecting soname
So, what to do from here?
Let me state very clearly I will *not* maintain this package in
Debian. I'm merely interested in it because we have been shipping it
in Tails [0] for a while, and getting it in a backportable state
implied to fix the RC bugs in it to start with. But I'm far from being
interested enough to commit myself to do good work on the long run on
this package.
[0] https://tails.boum.org/
However, I'm happy to help bootstrap some process that would make
barry's state better in Debian and Ubuntu. I'd be happy to help anyone
wanting to take responsibility of this. Both Chris and Martin have
been working on barry packaging recently, you may be interested to do
so directly in Debian, maybe by helping Jose, as part of a team,
maybe together?
Jose, please tell us what your plans regarding barry are. Are you
still interested in this package? Maybe you only needed a heads up and
some help to catch up with the backlog?
Cheers,
--
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