Updating lirc to upstream

[Alec Leamas]

Greetings!

I am the upstream maintainer of the lirc  [1]  package which is part of 
universe. Also, I am  more or less new to the Ubuntu developing community.

My interest is to update lirc to a more recent version. As of today, 
lirc has released 0.9.4. Ubuntu is still on 0.9.0,  from 2011, and this 
is becoming a problem upstream since we cannot really support the users 
of this very old version.  Also, recent kernel changes will break lirc 
0.9.0 in some usecases.

Of course, I have tried to make the update to Debian. However, the 
debian lirc maintainer is inactive, so this road is complicated. I have 
tried, really, for more or less a year. I have a packaging and a 
sponsor, but I'm blocked on the  maintainer.

So, questions: Is it policy-wise possible to update lirc in universe to 
0.9.4 even though Debian is still at 0.9.0?

If possible, how should it be handled?  The update cannot really be 
handled as a diff  (891 files changed:  147080 insertions, 77248 
deletions).  It's basically new packages.

There is a a PPA with a 0.9.4 packaging at  [2].  The changelog is a 
mess, see below for a tentative entry


Cheers!

--alec

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/lirc

[2] https://launchpad.net/~leamas-alec/+archive/ubuntu/lirc-0.9.4




---------------------------------------------------------- tentative 
changelog -------------------------------------------------------------

  * Non-maintainer upload.
   * First shot on major upstream updates.
     - Re-packaged from scratch based on new dh primitives.
     - Thanks for help on debian-mentors!
   * New upstream release 0.9.4
     - Release 0.9.1 .. 0.9.3 was never packaged.
     - Old 'lirc' service split into separate systemd services:
       lircd.service, lircmd.service and irexec.service.
     - Revised package structure: keep old liblircclient0 (renamed to
       liblirc-client0). Adding new packages liblirc0 and lirc-doc.
       Former liblircclient-dev merged into new liblirc-dev.
     - Fixes "Not updated to last version" (Closes: #777199).
     - Fixes "Default device for mode2 is /dev/lirc" (Closes: #702140).
     - Fixes "/var/run/lirc contents disappear..." (Closes: #676343).
     - Fixes "lircrcd segfaults" (Closes: #780062).
     - Fixes "'/etc/init.d/lirc restart' is broken" (Closes: #782091).
     - Fixes "Prompting due to modified conffiles..." (Closes: #655969).
     - Fixes "LIRC installs bad udev rule" (Closes: #804397),
       users depending on this rule will need to explicitly start lircd.
   * The built-in irman support is moved to the lirc-drv-irman package,
      lirc does not depend on libirman
   * Old lircd output socket link /dev/lirc dropped. Use 
/var/run/lirc/lircd.
   * Updated copyright
   * Fix hardening build flags.
   * Ship sysV updated scripts from the svn tree.  [Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]
   * Update compiler flags: -Wl,as-needed + hardening
     [Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]
   * Avoid negative architecture deps like [!hurd] (Closes: #634807)
     [Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]
   * Add patch 0007-tools-remove-configs-symlink.patch + explicit link
     to walk around #801719.
   * Changing Vcs-* headers to point to upstream packaging branch.