Giving away lesstif
Hi!
The lesstif packages have been in the "Packages that need a new maintainer"
section for a while now (http://www.debian.org/doc/prospective-packages.html),
but I've never actively tried to give them away before.
I've been maintaining them on a minimal level, by packaging new
lesstif releases when they show up, and I think the packages would
benefit from more energetic maintenance.
The most thorny packaging problem is not mentioned in the bug tracking
system. Some months ago, lesstif broke binary compatibility, and I
started building it with "--back-compat" to avoid breaking every
lesstif program on every Debian system. Unfortunately, this makes
Debian's lesstif libraries incompatible with the RPMs built by the
LessTif project. LessTif's soname (libXm.so.1) is pretty much locked
in by its desire for source compatibility with Motif and its use of
libtool, and I see no easy way out.
So, does anyone feel up to the task? Future bards will compose heroic
epics in your name :-)
Richard Braakman
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