How to propose software for the repository

Are you willing to take over maintenance of the package and manage it on an ongoing basis going forward?

If so:

The ideal process would probably be to get it into Debian so that Ubuntu can grab it so that Trisquel can grab it.

An alternative would be to work on making a Helper. See http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/package-helpers

An example package helper that pulls in a package from outside Ubuntu would be this one:

http://devel.trisquel.info/gitweb/?p=package-helpers.git;a=blob;f=helpers/make-handbrake;h=6ce9ba0148a51b584a8f16cbd9ca59ce78dae31b;hb=refs/heads/toutatis

Notice the EXTERNAL= line. So you'd need to set up a repository somewhere for the Helper to pull from.

By the way, Zotero is approved by the FSF: http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Zotero_client

Thank you very much for your detailed response jxself. I assumed that for FSF officially approved application one just lists it in the repo, or something like that.

My field of expertise is quite different from what's needed to maintain and manage a software package or to make a Helper. My one and only computer programming class in college was 20 years ago... The only scripts I can write nowadays are to run some statistical analyses in stat packages.

But if this is what's needed (someone to maintain and manage it or to make a Helper), I will ask the Zotero developers if they would consider doing that. They certainly have the expertize and they do want to make it easy for as many people as possible to use Zotero. They got grants from some very notable foundations to do exactly that.

Actually Debian does list Zotero Standalone as available in it's repositories:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/zotero-standalone

But I see "unstable" in the URL. I suppose that's why it's not yet in Ubuntu and in Trisquel. And I suppose this also means that once it becomes "stable" it may get sucked into Ubuntu and Trisquel - is this correct?

Thanks.

Because Zotero Standalone is free software approved by FSF, I will now provide the installation instructions:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:smathot/cogscinl
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zotero-standalone

Also, it should be available through the repositories (so it can be installed through Add/Remove Applications) for the Trisquel versions based on Ubuntu 13.10 or later.