Removing snacc?
Hi.
I think we should consider removing snacc. The software itself is very
old, not to say obsolete (I attached the README.Debian from the package
which documents the development status). The autotools files are a mess
from what I can tell and I tried several times to regenerate them to fix
the RC bug (The original files are from automake1.4, the package is
updated to automake1.7, big diff). But perhaps someone with more autotools
knowdlegde wouldn't have such problems...
It's orphaned for nearly a year and there were no volunteers for
adoption.
Comments welcome.
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/
snacc for Debian
----------------
Help appreciated:
1. Snacc is an old-style-ASN.1 compiler, a lot of people even say it's
totally obsolete. I don't think it's reasonable to hack on it to
make it compliant with the latest ASN.1 standards. ASN.1 has
changed a lot, has a lot of new features (object information
classes, constraints, parameterisation) and additional encoding
rules (PER - Packed Encoding Rules, XER - XML Encoding Rules. The
upcoming ECN (encoding control notation) will even give the user
complete control over the encoding. Therefore, a completely new,
all-purpose, free ASN.1 compiler is needed. If you have written
one, please drop me a letter - I would be happy to package it for
Debian GNU/Linux.
2. The snacc development has split up since 1997:
2.1 The root-of-all-snacc is by M. Sample and G. Neufeld, later
maintained by R. Joop and later by S. Wangnick. The last
version has been called 1.3b4, AFAIK. The last ChangeLog entry
is from 1997-09-16. I tried to contact the original authors,
but never got any sign of life.
2.2 BBN Technologies changed the build process of this version to
use GNU automake and libtool and fixed some things. The Debian
package uses this version, because it builds easily. The
Debian package adds the examples from older snacc versions.
Good work, but please update the ChangeLog next time :-) They
called their version 1.3 - I renamed it to 1.3bbn, to avoid
confusion with the old 1.3 version. The last ChangeLog entry
is from 1997-10-10. Some people seem to use and enhance this
version heavily, e.g. see bug report #202593 by Kai Henningsen
<kai@lisbeth2.intern.cats.ms>.
2.3 DigitalNet (formerly Getronics Government Solutions (formerly
J.G. Van Dyke & Associates, Inc)) changed snacc in parallel:
They added support for DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) and
some string types. Their branch is called eSNACC.
Unfortunately - last I checked - they don't use GNU automake
and libtool, but some proprietary build techniques (*.dsw and
*.dsp files), so this version does not build as cleanly as BBNs
under UNIX. Also, they renamed files, violating the GNU coding
standard, e.g. they renamed `ChangeLog', `NEWS', `README' and
everything else to all lower-case. They even renamed all .C
files into .cpp. The latest version is 1.5.1 from 2003-05.
But they do not update the ChangeLog, so the last entry is from
1997-09-16. Download it from
http://www.digitalnet.com/knowledge/snacc_lib.htm, source:
http://www.digitalnet.com/knowledge/snacc_lib/esnacc-1.5.1.tgz.
2.4 There is also a "Snacc for Java" (by IBM, I think). I don't
know anything about it.
It would be worthwhile to re-integrate the approaches 2.2 and 2.3.
OTOH, it would be a lot of work, better spend with 1., see above.
3. The Debian build of snacc leaves out the ASN.1 tree viewer/editor.
If anybody needs it and is able to compile the latest version of
the Tcl/Tk tree widget with latest version of Tcl/Tk, please
package it. Or better, write a new one, based on 1. and PyGTK.
-- W. Borgert <debacle@debian.org>, 2003-08-10T08:15+0000
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