I think we should remove balsa from Debian. I believe it's not used by members of the Debian GNOME team (who are the maintainer for old historical reasons) so there aren't any uploaders who are verifying that the app works. I am concerned by the recent bug reports from one user: https://bugs.debian.org/1093651 https://bugs.debian.org/1094681 balsa has a very old Request for Help bug: https://bugs.debian.org/642906 balsa is currently not in Testing but that's not really balsa's fault. Daniel Gillmor did some packaging work in 2020-2021 but then didn't reply to my comment on the RFH bug in 2022 or contributed to the packaging since. So I'm using this bug to check in with Daniel if he is still using balsa and can verify that it works or if he instead is comfortable with balsa being removed from Debian. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
Dear maintainers, I'm still using balsa on Debian Testing for several years several times a day (current version is 2.6.4-2+b4). I recently didn't find any bug worth for me writing a bug report and I cannot remember a crash during the last 6 month. Balsa is lightweight and nevertheless satisfies all my needs. I would greatly reget if balsa is removed from Debian. Thanks a lot to all maintainers and suppoerters!
Thank you so much for your wake-up call… The Balsa 2.6.4 release is actually almost 2½ years old, and in the meantime, lots of bugs have been fixed (I *think* [hope…] including those referenced in this bug report), and some new features have been added. We were just too lazy (or had too much “real life” work) to prepare a new release. We will try to catch up on that in the coming days (definitely before the Trixie soft freeze).
Ok, that schedule sounds good. Balsa should migrate to Testing this week after I fixed an autopkgtest issue that was preventing it. I've lowered the severity of this issue and I guess we can close it when we upload a new upstream release. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
Finally, the stable release of Balsa v. 2.6.5 is ready at <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/balsa/-/releases/2.6.5> Afaict, it builds cleanly on Trixie (tested x86_64 only, though), so it would be great if it could be included in a release. The package contains a sample (!) debian sub-folder for a meson-based build, with only a few more exotic features being disabled (support for the ancient GPE and the OSMO address books; ). Thanks, Albrecht.
Are you planning to update https://pawsa.fedorapeople.org/balsa/ ? Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
Hi Paweł, I'm afraid only you can answer Jeremy's question (see <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1094887>): Am 19.04.25 21:48 schrieb(en) Jeremy Bícha: If you (as you mentioned) want to “pass the baton” – maybe everything should be moved to the Wiki in Gnome Gitlab (and updated there)? What do you think? It appears that Peter or I with “Developer” role can create pages. Happy Easter, Albrecht.