Volker van Nek <volkervannek at googlemail.com>:
> I guess Ubuntu is using debian's sid packages. Maintainer is Camm
> Maguire. I tried to contact him around easter this year and got response
> from his company that he quits his job. I do not observe any maintenance
> of Maxima by Camm in debian any more. I believe it's broken. I do not
> hope that Camm is in big trouble.
>
> So in fact in debian sid there is still Maxima 5.17.1 and no improvement
> in sight. I think it's time to get the people of debian and Ubuntu
> informed about that. So who is to contact?
Debian has a QA-Team that tracks maintainer activity. They also have
the possibility to 'orphan' a package so that somebody else can take
over maintainer duties. Perhaps it is a good idea if you contact them
and provide them with the details you know...
I'm sure there are enough people willing to take care of maxima in
debian. Obvious first contacts would be the maintainers of the various
lisps and the maintainer of wxmaxima.
As for ubuntu, I think they just grab the debian package and recompile
it for their environment in some semi-automatic way. So there is always
some risk of ubuntu specific breakage, but I guess chances are good that
the situation improves once things are sorted on the debian side.
HTH,
Harald