Dear Gürkan (maintainer of cool-retro-termin in Debian), dear Filippo (upstream if cool-retro-term),
Dear Mike,
we (Ubuntu Touch developer team) are maintaining an Ubuntu Touch app called lomiri-terminal-app. This app bundles an embedded copy of qmlterminwidget. The lomiri-terminal-app has also just been uploaded to Debian unstable (as part of the complete Lomiri Operating Environment, formerly known as Ubuntu's Unity8). We would like to get rid of the embedded copy of qmltermwidget code in lomiri-terminal-app and would like to bundle efforts on qmltermwidget upstream development and Debian package maintenance.
That is a good plan, already suggested with #991987
The current packaging situation of qmltermwidget in Debian is suboptimal as it is wrapped into the cool-retro-term source package in Debian [1] and also versioned with cool-retro-term (i.e. both packages have the same Debian package version). From my perspective, qml-module-qmltermwidget should be a standalone source package (with its own software/package version). On the upstream side qmltermwidget is also a separate Git upstream project [2] and only bundled into cool-retro-term via Git submoduling. However, for upstream's qmltermwidget I don't see any recent release tags. One of our Ubuntu Touch devs (Guido Berhörster) has already worked on preparing some upstream pull requests for qmltermwidget so that qmltermwidget on Github [2] will become usable for Ubuntu Touch / lomiri-terminal-app. These PRs will be communicated directly on Github.
I have no objections to split qmltermwidget out of cool-retro-term, please go ahead.
For Debian, I'd like to propose splitting out the qmltermwidget bin:pkg out of cool-retro-term src:pkg and uploading qmltermwidget as a separate src:pkg. I could handle this packaging + uploading, if ok with Gürkan. From upstream, this would ideally require some qmltermwidget release tagging in the future, so we in Debian get notified about changes worth-to-be-updated-and-packaged. In cool-retro-term, you would have to specify a minimal version of qmltermwidget that is required to successfully run/build cool-retro-term.
Ack. I would like to suggest to add me to uploaders for the new qmltermwidget
package. I know some projects are lazy about tagging realeases which I "solve" with the git2deb script, available here: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/devscripts/-/merge_requests/276
Would you guys be open to such a shift? Could we get this done before the Debian 12 freeze (Jan 12th 2023). This would mean that we should get started with is the coming days.
Sounds like a good plan. Best,
Greets, Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org, currently in the role of Ubuntu Touch's core team tech lead) [1] https://packages.debian.org/source/unstable/cool-retro-term [2] https://github.com/Swordfish90/qmltermwidget/
