Hello, the openSUSE firebird package is going to be orphaned soon and anyone willing to maintain it is welcome to take over. Short term, there shouldn't be much trouble with it, except for the fallout of what happens in openSUSE Factory project. The 3.0.7 point release is already in Factory and the next 3.0.x release is expected in about half a year. I don't expect much complications with future 3.0.x point releases. Upgrade to version 4 will be more tricky as the upstream ICU detection code has been reworked and will require some effort to adapt for openSUSE ICU packages versioning and soname tweaks. But firebird is not exactly known for rushing new versions so that there should be enough time to work this out. The background: as I learned on Wednesday, Dominique Leuenberger plans to add more checks for openSUSE Factory packages and two of them would break the build of firebird package. As he insists the build breakage must be resolved in a way I find unacceptable, I decided to step down as the package maintainer once the build is broken. I wanted to go on maintaining the package as long as possible but as Mr. Leuenberger insists that I should announce my stepping down now and he even invited another person who went as far as accusing me of "failure to conduct oneself following the norms of our communities" and "breach of SUSE's Open Source Policy", I changed my mind. I have had enough bad experiences with that person in the past and having to deal with him again is something I would be happy to avoid. Thus I'm sending this announcement now even if there is no technical reason to give up the maintainership yet. Michal Kubecek