Re: RFS: lesstif2 AND Questions about collab-maint
Hi,
> I had to let your message sink in....
Hm, did I write something weird or hard to grind? If so, I'd try to rephrase
my point.
> George Danchev wrote:
> > Since it seems you have put so much work and time into that package,
> > I guess you deserve at least an honest reply ;-)
>
> Thanks.
>
> > I'm not familiar with the lesstif2 concepts and internals, which
> > doesn't seem to be trivial at all, so I wouldn't be able to properly
> > review and upload, but I think that, in general, before putting
> > considerable amount of work into whatever neglected or understaffed
> > package, it is a good idea to sound the interest and intentions of
> > your prospective sponsors. That might eventually avoid wasting
> > sponsoree's own time. Otherwise, taking care of such packages is very
> > welcome, indeed, so I hope you find a proper sponsor!
>
> I do agree that the internals of lesstif2 are not trivial. However
> according to popcon [1] it is a highly popular (if that can be said of a
> library), which has received very little attention (both upstream and in
> Debian).
Eventually, such a popularity could be explained as 'past glory'; it was
popular once, but with the advent of more advanced windowing/widget/ui
toolkits it probably still stays on user machines largely unused and mostly
obsoleted.
> I am working, albeit slowly, together with the Fedora
> maintainer of lesstif2, because he also thinks that the large distro's
> should team up to resurrect lesstif. My maintenance work on upstream
> (the new release) has been taken up by several distro's, but not by
> Debian, where I started to do the work for.
Yeah, I see that human time has been invested and the result is left
unaddressed until that point for various reasons, including prosaic. Please,
don't get me wrong, taking care of existing packages and the packages
dependent on them is a good thing, however I personally have misgivings with
resurrecting already dead or bit rotten code bases which that implementation
of Motif appears to be. (and yes, I'm a former user of CDE and some other
Motif applications, but as of today I'd let them rest in piece, honestly ;-)
> I agreed with Sam Hocevar,
> the maintainer of lesstif2, that I could co-maintain, but he already
> said that I should also seek elsewhere for uploads in case he did not
> respond.
I suspect he is mostly interested in wxwidgets presently.
> Now do I understand correctly that you mean that I should sorta search
> for a sponsor in advance? As said, I basically have a sponsor, but he is
> not very responsive. Furthermore, my sponsor for Nedit also promised
> that he could have a look at it, but apparently he also has different
> priorities. For those reasons I am looking on this list as well.
Well, yes. Having sponsors interest nicely presented on your radar for an
ancient package like that, would certainly help you to adjust your priorities
soon. IMO, lesstif and dependents are far beyond their life cycle, and I'm not
at all sure if I personally want to see them in our next stable release. That
is my opinion, other might disagree.
> The changes with respect to the previous version of lesstif2 in Debian
> are not that big (remember that most changes in upstream are already
> applied in the current Debian version) and mainly two things:
> "rebootstrapping", ie running
> libtoolize/aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake again (script in
> debian/patches/000_bootstrap_script.diff) and fixing several obsoleted
> macro functions (005_libtool_obsolete.diff).
I don't know about security of release teams, but my eyes hurt badly when I
look at ancient code base like that, but that is just me ;-)
> Next Sunday I will start working with a friend on a problematic part of
> lesstif, which is related to bug 545672 [2]. Copy/paste is not very well
> implemented and causes strange behavior when a clipboard manager is
> working. Now, I don't know much yet about icccm, but we'll try to figure
> it out. Apart from helping FOSS, I also consider this a learning
> experience for myself, so I do not consider my time waisted.
Okay, I respect your point and your time. I just tried to give some pointers
eventually to explain the lack of interest of your prospective sponsors.
--
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB <people.fccf.net/danchev/key pgp.mit.edu>
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