poco library is "basically orphaned", newer version available, Mumble has poco dependency

[Chris Knadle]

Greetings.

I'm in kind of a tight spot and hope to get a "clearance to proceed" or
reasonable guidance on how to handle this situation.

All recent versions of Mumble (>= 1.4) build-depend on poco c++
libraries which are RC buggy in Debian due to being outdated (depends on
pcre3 which is slated to be removed -- pcre2 is the newer replacement).
Poco is "basically orphaned" -- the last communicating developer has
stated in Bug#999989 that he removed himself from the package uploaders
in the Git repo, and that all the other listed maintainers have not been
heard from in "a long time" (it's apparently been years) -- but the
package has not yet been orphaned via an upload.

There seem to be a total of 5 packages reverse-depending on poco
libraries: clickhouse, clamfs, gm-assistant, gpsshogi, mumble -- all of
these are blocked from migrating to Testing because of poco.

Here's what I would wish to do "in a perfect world":

1. I'd like to do an NMU upload to orphan the package. This is required
to get the package on the "orphaned" list to notify developers that a
new maintainer is needed.

2. I'd like to do an NMU upload of an updated version of the library,
preferably with some help from a DD that has done library releases to
insure the proper release processes are done. This seems like how things
would be done in the Ubuntu world where packages don't have official
maintainers. Updating the library would allow the packages depending on
it to migrate, and would remove one of the 16 reverse-dependencies of
libpcre3-dev.

Thanks

--

Chris Knadle
Chris....@coredump.us
Debian Developer

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Chris,

This sounds all sensible. Make sure you do so in its Git repository[1].
If you need help you might actually specify in more detail what help is
needed - possibly also asking on debian-...@lists.debian.org.

Kind regards
Andreas.


[1] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/poco

--
http://fam-tille.de

[Chris Knadle]

Thanks for responding, Andreas.

Additioanl notes below.

Yes, I've already cloned the Git repo locally and assuming I have
permissions to commit there with my Salsa login then I'll push the
changes to the Poco Git repo. If I can't push the changes then I'll
clone the repo on Salsa and repoint the VCS location. The Git history
will be preserved one way or another.

Getting help from Debian Mentors sounds like a good suggestion.

Thank you very much