Package: ftp.debian.org Severity: normal I'm the usual sponsor of dolibarr in Debian. The maintainer (and upstream author) Eldy Destailleur announced me a few weeks ago that he will no longer be maintaining Dolibarr within Debian because it was too much of a pain to respect all the Debian requirements.
He explained to me that Dolibarr relies on 15 javascripts libraries (some of them are dependencies of the libraries that Dolibarr are using in the first place) and 5 PHP libraries. Debian's requirement to provide a non-minified copy of the javascript is really hard to meet for him because often the projects are only providing the sources under the form a github link (and not under the form of a non-minified javascript that we could put next to the minified file to please lintian). He would have to spend a lot of times with the different upstreams to get them to provide the non-minified file in a form that is suitable for Debian. It's even likely that his requests would be dismissed by multiple upstream authors leaving him in the inconvenient position of having to remove features to be able to ship a policy-compliant Debian package. The requirement to use packaged versions of all the libraries is also problematic. More often that not the version used by Dolibarr will not match the version currently available in Debian and it's always a risk to use a different version. Sometimes it will work just fine, sometimes it will break. Given all those constraints, he decided to stop trying to maintain Dolibarr in Debian and the Dolibarr project will only provide an unofficial .deb embedding all the libraries that they need. I doubt anyone else is willing to maintain Dolibarr in Debian and I'm thus requesting the package to be removed. Users are better served by the upstream unofficial package rather than by Debian's outdated package (it's outdated due to the difficulty of updating it in a policy-compliant way). I would hope that we could find a way to get the best of both worlds but right now it seems that we don't have a good solution for that kind of web application. Thank you.
