Hi, I have more than a few packages that I've been looking to get rid of for some time. No one's taken them, so I'm going to request the ftp masters drop some of them if no one takes them within the few weeks. These packages are: * messagewall - An SMTP proxy daemon, designed to help keep out unwanted email This package no longer has an upstream maintainer. If you want it, you'll probably need to become upstream as well. Otherwise, I'll have it dropped from the archive. * firedns - an asynch. dns resolver library This library is by the same author as messagewall, and is still maintained; however, there haven't been any new releases in a while. Messagewall depends upon it, as well as a few other things not in debian (such as dsbl.org's tester program(s)). It's actually a neat little library, but with nothing else in Debian using it, there's not much point in keep it in the archive. * firestring - a string handling library Again, this library is by the same author as messagewall, and is still maintained. Messagewall depends upon it, but nothing else in Debian uses it. I'm going to have it removed from the archive if no one wants it. * libxml-ruby - Ruby interface to libxml * libxslt-ruby - Ruby interface to libxslt These are fairly useful; however, afaict they are no longer maintained upstream. There is a fairly sordid history here; basically, the original author (Sean Chittenden) stopped maintaining them around 2002 or 2003. He licensed them under a BSD license (iirc). In 2003, Gregoire Lejeune started maintaining libxslt; however, he relicensed the program under the GPL, and stripped off Sean's copyright information (violating Sean's license); this is according to Sean, anyways. At some point in 2004/2005, someone named Trans Onoma imported them into the xml-tools [1] repository, but he hasn't worked on them since 2004 or so. I have no idea whether or not he intends to actively maintain them. Sid still contains Sean's last releases, from 2002/2003. I don't know whether Gregoire's latest version even contains any of Sean's original code; I no longer have a use for either of these packages, so I haven't bothered to figure it out. Whoever takes over these packages should probably talk to the upstream (or ask on one of the ruby lists) to find out which will actively be maintained. Both licenses are problematic for libraries as well, so maybe simply rewriting them from scratch under the LGPL or 3-clause BSD would be the best way to go here. Given the licensing pains and upstream squabbling, I'm going to remove these from the archive if no one takes them. * libhtml-tokenizer-ruby - simple HTML tokenizer/parser for Ruby This is a really easy package, and still actively maintained [2] upstream. It's great for quickly parsing html; I used it in scripts to interface the bitkeeper web interface, back when Linus used bitkeeper (so that I didn't have to install the non-free bk client). However, now that Linus uses git, I don't have a use for this package. I'll simply orphan this one, if no one takes it. * par2 - Parity Archive Volume Set, for checking and repair of files If you've ever downloaded those funny .par2 files off newgroups, this is the tool you need to actually make use of them. It's maintained upstream (afaict), but hasn't had a new release in a while. I'll orphan this one as well, if no one takes it. [1] http://rubyforge.org/projects/xml-tools/ [2] http://rubyforge.org/projects/htmltokenizer/ -- Andres Salomon <dilinger@debian.org>
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