[Plplot-devel] PLplot Debian package

[Ole S. <deb...@li...>]

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 However, the package is outdated and not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
<deb...@li...>.

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