For visibility purposes I decided to file this bug report. People
tracking this package should know that Sphinx Search 3.x series is not
open source anymore, and upstream does not plan to switch back to open
source due to their business priorities.

There are free (as in beer) binaries at
https://sphx.org/downloads/current/ for those who want to use it, but
Debian officially won't have new versions of Sphinx anymore.

There is a discussion in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=911761
about using a potential open replacement in Debian.

Hi,

In fact, the sphinxsearch package in experimental is *already*
manticore, just an old version.

That said, help would be welcome to bring it up-to-date, provide better
migration, and help get it into unstable :)

Thanks for reminding. I’ve merged all these bugs; hopefully one day I
(or someone else) finds time to work on this.